Texas Crossings: The Lone Star State and the American Far West, 1836–1986 9781477304433

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Texas Crossings

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TEXAS CROSSINGS

T h e Lone Star State and the A m e r i c a n Far West, 1836-1986 Howard R. Lamar

Foreword by Lewis L. Gould

University of Texas Press, Austin

Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

First edition, 1991 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, A N S Í Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lamar, Howard Roberts. Texas crossings : the Lone Star State and the American Far West, 1 8 3 6 1986 / Howard R. Lamar ; foreword by Lewis L. Gould. — ist ed. p. cm. 'The George W. Littlefield lectures in American history"—Foreword. Includes bibliographical references and index. I S B N 0-292-78115-6 (alk. paper) i . Trails—Texas—History. 2. Trails—Southwest, New— History. 3. Texas—Description and travel. 4. Southwest, New— Description and travel. S.California—Gold discoveries. 6. Overland journeys to California. I. Title. II. Title: George W. Littlefield lectures in American history. F391.L24 978—dc20

1991 90-25573

CIP

Contents

Foreword by L e w i s L . G o u l d Preface 1. Texas and the C a l i f o r n i a G o l d R u s h

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2. A Breed A p a r t : Texans i n the C a l i f o r n i a G o l d R u s h , 1849-1869

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3. Imperial Strategies: Texas, California, and the Southwest, 1 8 3 6 - 1 9 8 6

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Notes

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Suggestions for Further Reading

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Index

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Photos and maps f o l l o w i n g page 37

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Foreword

The George W. Littlefield Lectures i n American history offer the most recent example of the generosity and vision of one of the great benefactors of the University of Texas at Austin. Major George W. Littlefield ( 1 8 4 2 - 1 9 2 0 ) was a Confederate veteran, cattle rancher, and founder and president of the American National Bank i n Austin. H e became a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Texas i n 1911. Worried that the cause of the South was not being accurately portrayed i n American history, he cooperated w i t h Professor Eugene C . Barker, chairman of the Department of History at the University, to find ways to "begin the foundation for acquiring a history, i n w h i c h the South w i l l be accorded her just rights." In 1914, out of Littlefield's collaboration w i t h Barker, a $ 2 5 , 0 0 0 endowment created the Littlefield Fund for Southern History to purchase relevant historical materials. When Littlefield died i n 1920, his w i l l bequeathed an additional $ 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 for the same purpose. Using the i n come from the fund, the Littlefield Committee and the librarians at the University of Texas assembled i n the Barker Texas History Center a collection of books, pamphlets, newspapers, and manuscripts that documented southern, southwestern, and Texas history i n its richness and diversity. In 1937 the Littlefield Fund also sponsored a ten-volume History of the South to be published by Louisiana State University Press. Such distinguished books as C . Vann Woodward's Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951) and George B. TindalPs The Emergence of the New South (1967) made the project an important contribution to modern southern cultural history. D u r i n g the 1980s the fund's growth and success brought further benefits to the University of Texas. The Board of Regents created the George W. Littlefield Professorship i n American History, to w h i c h Pro-

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fessor Robert A . D i v i n e was appointed. Matching funds that became available as a result of the University's Centennial celebration during 1 9 8 1 - 1 9 8 3 led to the creation of the Eugene C . Barker Centennial Professorship i n American History and the appointment of Professor Lewis L. G o u l d as its occupant. A t this time the Littlefield Committee also decided to establish an endowment for a biennial lecture series, the George W. Littlefield Lectures i n American history. The first Littlefield lecturer was Professor Howard R. Lamar of Yale University, who spoke i n M a r c h 1986 on "Texas Crossings." T w o years later Professor Forrest M c D o n a l d of the University of Alabama gave the second series of Littlefield Lectures on ' T h e Constitution and the Founding Fathers." In autumn 1990 Professor Robert Dallek of the University of California, Los Angeles, w i l l deliver the third series of Littlefield Lectures on "Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rise of Liberal N a tionalism." The Littlefield Lectures seem well established as a continuation of Major Littlefield's goal to invigorate historical study i n the South. The choice of Howard Lamar to give the first Littlefield Lectures was a natural and logical one. Sterling Professor of History at Yale, Lamar is a preeminent scholar of the American West. A native of A l a bama, Lamar is an alumnus of Emory University who received his graduate training at Yale, where he obtained his P h . D . i n 1951. He began his teaching career at Yale i n 1949, was chairman of the History Department 1 9 6 7 - 1 9 7 0 , and dean of Yale College 1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 5 . He was also president of the Western History Association i n 1 9 7 1 - 1 9 7 2 . Lamar's writings on the West have been influential and important. His first book, Dakota Territory, 1861-1889 (1956), provided revealing insights into the process by w h i c h western settlers came to terms w i t h eastern political institutions. The Far Southwest, 1850-1912 (1966) examined the territories of Arizona, Colorado, N e w Mexico, and U t a h and made incisive analytic comparisons about the formative political and economic experiences of these future states. During the last twenty-five years, Lamar's research has included a comparison of the frontier i n N o r t h America and South Africa, the western trader and his impact, and the story of the overland trails. Prolific as an author, Lamar has been equally influential as a teacher. His graduate students are reshaping the way i n w h i c h historians view the West i n American history. A s a director of dissertations, he is patient w i t h youthful enthusiasm and wise i n guiding the fledgling historian around potential obstacles. H i s criticisms are delivered quietly and without harshness, but he leaves no doubt that he expects the highest standards of performance to be pursued. Generous w i t h his

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praise, Lamar combines encouragement and professional support i n a manner that makes h i m an exemplary mentor. "Texas Crossings" was a well-received series of lectures. Audiences responded w i t h questions and discussion, and those who heard Lamar's remarks urged that they be made available i n published form. The Littlefield Committee agreed enthusiastically. These graceful essays reflect Howard Lamar's mastery of the sources on the various ways i n w h i c h Americans and foreigners passed through Texas on their way to California and the West. They also demonstrate his capacity to make perceptive connections among disparate aspects of a historical process. He links Stephen F. Austin, Ben M c C u l l o c h , Lyndon B. Johnson, and M a u r y Maverick as participants i n a story of discovery and renewal that has gone on as long as Texas itself. When the state is seen as a place to be passed through, as well as a destination to reach, important phases of Texas history take on a fresh significance. The George W. Littlefield Fund Committee is delighted to share w i t h a l l those interested i n the history of Texas, the American South, and the United States the wisdom and thoughtfulness that Howard R. Lamar brought to his own Texas Crossings. Lewis L. G o u l d

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Preface

It is a great honor to have been invited to give the first George W. Littlefield Lectures at the University of Texas at A u s t i n . The invitation came at a time when, because of the approaching sesquicentennial of Texas independence and the establishment of the Lone Star Republic, many historians were taking a new look at the crucial formative years embracing these and many other signal events. The invitation also came at a time when Texas history was at the forefront of m y own work, for I have been concerned w i t h the history of the two pacemaker states for the American West i n this century— California and Texas—and their relation to one another as w e l l as to other western states. O n a less grand scale, I have also been engaged i n writing a history of the overland trails to California. During the research for that project, I concluded that the southern trails to California, and especially those that passed through or touched Texas, had been badly neglected. This omission occurred even though the diaries and journals of both Texan and non-Texan argonauts told a fascinating story that matches, i n terms of high drama, adventure, hardship, fear, and death, the vivid experiences of gold seekers and settlers on that central overland trail that went by way of South Pass to Oregon or California. A s I investigated further, an engrossing story of the relation of Texas to Mexico, N e w Mexico, California, and the entire transMississippi West i n the nineteenth and twentieth centuries emerged as an ever-recurring theme i n the sources and literature I consulted. For this reason I have chosen the phrase "Texas Crossings" as the overall theme of m y Littlefield Lectures; after all, the history of the state has always been one of people i n motion. In prehistoric times the ancestors of Texas Indians came from the north i n search of warmer

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lands and game, somewhat as did the Comanche centuries later. T h e n came religious ideas and such trade items as copper from the Southeast and Mississippi Valley tribes westward to Texas; at the same time, moving from west to east, the Apache raided Pawnee for goods and slaves and vice versa. W i t h the coming of Europeans, heroic individual Texas crossings occurred, one of the most famous being Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's lengthy trek westward from the Texas coast, where he was shipwrecked, to northern N e w Spain i n the 1530s i n a desperate search for fellow Spaniards. A century and a half later, Rène Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, an ambitious, possibly mad French nobleman, full of dreams about establishing a French empire i n the Mississippi Valley, after landing on Matagorda Bay, tried to make his way eastward to the Mississippi, only to be murdered by his own men. A few years later, a dashing Frenchman from Quebec, Louis de St. Denis, operating from a base i n Louisiana, pursued a career of diplomatic intrigue, clever trading, and womanizing i n Spanish Texas and N e w Spain's northern borderlands that led h i m all the way to Mexico C i t y and back. In the late eighteenth century, i n a last burst of energy, Spanish officers sent Pedro Vial, a shrewd gunsmith, to establish trails between Santa Fe and St. Louis and Santa Fe and San Antonio, a task at w h i c h he succeeded i n part because he ingratiated himself w i t h potentially hostile Indian tribes by repairing their guns. However, Vial's proposed valuable paths of empire were turned into ropes of sand by the French Revolution. Then there are the crossings of the filibusters of the 1810s, the coming of Stephen A u s t i n and other colonists i n the 1820s and 1830s, the troops of Santa Anna, Urrea, and Filisola crossing to fight the barely assembled Texas A r m y i n 1 8 3 5 - 1 8 3 6 , and the subsequent exploits of the Texas Rangers on both sides of Texas' southern borders i n the 1840s and 1850s. Further, there was the ill-fated Santa Fe Expedition of 1841, w h i c h scattered its soldier-merchant members thousands of miles south to Mexican jails. Perhaps the most significant crossing, however, was that of General Zachary Taylor i n 1846 when he marched to the Rio Grande at the outset of the Mexican War. The list seems to be endless. In the 1850s southern slave owners mounted expeditions to recapture fugitive blacks who had fled to Mexico. There were also intellectual crossings, as evidenced by Robert J. Walker's and John C . Calhoun's arguments that if Texas were admitted to the U n i o n as a slave state, it would attract the surplus slaves from the eastern states of the O l d South and then the slaves would drift to

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Mexico, where they could be declared free and, that, by a curious rite of evasive passage, might solve the question of slavery i n the U n i t e d States. The westward and northwestward crossings of Colonel John R. Baylor and General H . H . Sibley to take N e w Mexico and Arizona at the outbreak of the C i v i l War were countermanded by the southward moving of Colorado volunteers and N e w Mexican troops under General E. R. S. Canby and the eastward-moving California volunteers under General James H . Carleton. Even after Appomattox the military crossings did not stop. Black soldiers i n Federal uniforms came to fight Comanche and to guard trails to California. A n d as a consequence of the defeat of the C o manche i n the 1870s, Mexican Americans from N e w M e x i c o quietly spread east into the Panhandle and the Llano Estacado i n what Donald M e i n i g calls one of the larger unknown population movements of the Southwest. But, of course, the Texas crossings that Americans came to know best were the long drives of Texas cattle north through Indian country to the railheads i n Kansas. A s one looks at this curious form of universal nomadism, one is tempted to exclaim, as did an early visitor to the state, "Texas is not a place, it is a commotion!" While most Americans think of Texas as a distinctive place w i t h a unique culture, or a peculiarly different state of m i n d and matter, Texas—like early Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and M i s s o u r i — i s possibly one of the most traveled-through states i n the United States. Further, because of that motion, it has always related to or had a powerful effect upon its neighbors. A t the same time, m u c h of its history related to larger continental events such as the California gold rush, the first overland stage line, and the long fight to realize a railroad along the thirty-second parallel. Or, i n this century, Texas was one of the Dust Bowl states that contributed to the massive flow of farm migrants to California during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thus Texas should be considered an integral part of the general physical, psychological, and cultural expansion across the continent so vividly described by Ray A l l e n Billington i n his enduringly popular text, Westward Expansion and so brilliantly interpreted by Henry Nash Smith i n his Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Indeed, Texas deserves recognition as a launching pad for A m e r i can empire alongside that of Missouri, and San Antonio and E l Paso need even fuller study as jumping-off places for western enterprises and adventures. It is this many-sided theme of mobility i n Texas history that I discussed i n the three Littlefield Lectures. In the process I described the 1

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early forms taken by the ideas of moving beyond Texas to penetrate other regions for reasons of trade, settlement, empire, or whatever. More particularly, for the first lecture I explored the impressions of both Texan and non-Texan gold seekers as they moved through the state between 1849 and the mid-1850s, the ways i n w h i c h the trails themselves were developed, and what larger meaning and impact they eventually came to have for Texans and non-Texans alike. The second lecture, " A Breed Apart," explored the role of both southerners and Texans i n California's turbulent gold rush society during the 1850s. To call attention to the impact of the South on the Far West is hardly a new proposal. M a n y years ago W i l l i a m Binkley pointed to the promise of such studies i n a superb essay i n the Journal of Southern History. Curiously, relatively few scholars have pursued this theme i n terms of Texas and California connections. The last lecture, "Imperial Strategies," attempted an overview of some forty years of Texas efforts to connect the state to California by means of a transcontinental railroad. For many Texans this was the most significant of all crossings, for it promised trade and markets w i t h a l l parts of the nation, including, of course, the West. Ironically, it was the Californians who made that long-delayed dream a reality when the Southern Pacific built a line eastward to Texas. It is m y hope that Texas Crossings, instead of being seen as a recital of events long past, w i l l be seen as part of a theme of mobility that can be found i n Texas and the West today. M o b i l i t y may have been a characteristic of the American frontier, but it continues to be an overwhelming feature of both national and western life. The contemporary phenomenon deserves serious study if for no other reasons than to trace population shifts and the rise of the Sunbelt. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Western Americana C o l lection, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, for permission to reproduce material from the Journal of Robert Beeching; Linweed, "Narrative of a Journey to California i n 1849"; and Richard Dallan, " D i a r y and Journal"; and to the Eugene C . Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote and paraphrase material from the Maury Maverick, Sr., papers. I have been greatly assisted i n the preparation of these lectures by Robert Divine, Lewis Gould, and Thomas Cutrer of the University of Texas at Austin, and by Ron C . Tyler, director of the Texas State Historical Association. Conversations w i t h Yale colleagues, W i l l i a m Cronon, Jay G i t l i n , George Miles, Paul Stone, and C . Vann Woodward were extremely helpful. James Crisp of North Carolina State Univer2

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sity and Harwood H i n t o n of the University of Arizona, both Texans born and bred, provided important critiques of the essays. A m o n g others who assisted i n locating obscure but important sources were Patricia A . Etter of Tucson and Elliott West of the University of A r k a n sas. I am grateful to the Huntington Library for a fellowship that enabled me to use Southern Trails materials, and I owe a particular debt to M a r t i n Ridge and Peter Blodgett of the Huntington. Robert Wooster of Corpus Christi State University has been especially helpful i n pointing out errors i n the original manuscript and i n identifying additional sources. Frankie Westbrook has been both patient and imaginative as an editor. A n d finally, I wish to thank Ethel Himberg and Betsy M c C a u l l e y for their role i n the typing of the final draft. Howard R. Lamar

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Although it has been more than half a century since Frederick Jackson Turner made us conscious of the importance of the West in American development, one still looks in vain for a systematic study of the part the South may have played in determining the character of the West. —William C. Binkley,

Journal of Southern History 17 (1951): 6

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1 Texas and the California Gold Rush

One of the first American settlers of Texas to comment on the larger meaning of Texas i n terms of "crossings" was Stephen F. Austin, its most famous colonizer and its most distinguished early citizen. Austin sought to promote Texas immigration not only by praising the land and its great promise, the superb climate, and its many resources but also by commenting on how quickly one could come from N e w Orleans, Havana, and Vera Cruz to Texas—or go from Texas to those places. He noted that Texas was a way to reach N e w Mexico, Chihuahua, and indeed all the Mexican states lying to the west. " T h e West Indies lie i n front," he said, "and there is an immense extent of M e x i can coast to the South, thus affording channels of trade i n every direct i o n . " In an 1831 brochure, he added the promise that the M e x i c a n interior " w i l l afford a market." Meanwhile, Joel R. Poinsett, the United States minister to Mexico, was pressing the Mexicans to interpret the Adams-Oñis Treaty of 1819 i n such a way that the R i o Grande, rather than the Sabine, would become the border between the United States and M e x i c o . 1

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Pursuing another expansionist theme i n the first days of Texas independence, the influential New Orleans Bee became excited at the prospect of a railroad between N e w Orleans and the Gulf of California by way of Natchitoches. In 1841 W i l l i a m Kennedy, a talented and articulate young British writer and diplomat, was assigned to represent his government i n the new Republic of Texas. Fascinated by the grand prospects for Texas, he wrote an optimistic history of the Republic i n w h i c h he announced to his English readers that, as an independent state, Texas would help settle upper California and that an overland route to the west coast was already projected. Besides being a good public relations man who was interested i n promoting the sale of 4

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Texas lands to British investors, Kennedy was also a romantic poet, and perhaps this claim of an overland route is a good example of poetic license. Kennedy also expressed similar views i n a brochure entitled Texas and California Correspondence, i n w h i c h he observed that upper California was only a "nominal link of the disorganized M e x i can republic whose early, absolute and final severance from M e x i c o is inevitable." Kennedy's untrammeled optimism led an irate British critic to respond that it was very expensive, dangerous, and difficult to go from Texas to California. He stated that he had it on good authority because his cousin, the British consul at Monterey, California, had reported it was a devil of a place to get to from anywhere. 6

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These visionary dreams of a Gulf-to-Pacific route were temporarily set aside, however, when Texans became involved i n three moreimmediate problems. First, once independence was assured i n 1836, Texas officials began a campaign to make the border of the infant Republic the Rio Grande instead of the Nueces River, as stated i n the Treaty of Velasco. That debate was not resolved until the United States occupied the disputed territory at the outbreak of the Mexican War and secured confirmation of Texas' claims i n the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Second, the Republic of Texas claimed that its borders extended both southward to the Rio Grande and westward and northward to its source, to include much of eastern N e w Mexico and even Santa Fe, its capital. Third, Mirabeau B. Lamar, the Republic's second president, tried to combine his own political dream of an independent Texas that stretched from the Gulf to the Pacific coast—including N e w M e x i c o — w i t h the ambitions of some Texas merchants who hoped to capture the Santa Fe trade from Missouri and to turn it toward San Antonio and even Houston. A s we know, the 1841 Texan Santa Fe Expedition of merchants and adventurers was a disaster, so that neither the assertion of political hegemony nor commercial trade was ever realized. 8

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Despite these efforts and the actual appearance i n 1849 of a group of Texas commissioners, headed by Captain Robert S. Neighbors, w i t h orders to organize the Santa Fe region into four counties, that issue was not resolved until the Compromise of 1850 established the boundaries of N e w Mexico and Texas approximately where they remain today. In short, m u c h of the history of the new Republic was one of frustrated crossings i n the name of expansionism, a theme that W i l l i a m C . Binkley has traced so effectively i n his book on Texas i n this period. The issue of disputed borders was still being resolved when the discovery of gold i n California once again awakened hopes for a transcontinental route from Texas to California. 10

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Texas Trails to Gold Rush California In August 1848 the U.S. press began to report that gold had been discovered i n the race of a lumber m i l l that Colonel John Augustus Sutter was building at Coloma, California, about forty miles east of Sacramento. The reports said that the discovery had been made the preceding January. Curiously no one on the Atlantic Coast paid m u c h attention to this early news. Then i n September the New Orleans Daily Picayune quoted Lieutenant Edward F. Beale of the United States army as saying that gold i n paying quantities had been found i n California. Although he had just returned from California, Lieutenant Beale's news was at first more or less ignored, w h i c h suggests that our ancestors did not take newspaper stories very seriously. Because most news reached Texas via N e w Orleans i n three days, the gold rush was probably k n o w n i n Texas i n September. 12

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By mid-September Lieutenant Beale was making his assertions i n Washington, and the public began to pay attention. That same month both N e w York and Philadelphia newspapers received a letter from the Reverend Walter Colton, author of My Three Years in California, w h i c h raved about the gold discoveries. Wrote Colton histrionically, "Your streams have minnows i n them, and ours are paved w i t h g o l d . " By October 1 major newspapers of the country had at last begun to carry the story, but even then no major gold rush developed u n t i l President Polk verified the existence of gold i n his annual message to C o n gress i n December 1848. By that time Governor Richard B. Mason of California, an area that was still neither a territory nor a state but a conquered province, had sent Lieutenant Lucien Loeser east to Washington w i t h actual gold samples to show the government. A s we all know, a fantastic gold fever did develop, and by January 1849 tens of thousands of men were busily preparing to go to the gold fields. M a n u facturers of picks, shovels, and pans blissfully reported that they were overwhelmed w i t h orders. Although it is impossible to get an exact count, probably some seventy thousand to ninety thousand argonauts went to California i n 1849, of w h i c h six thousand to seven thousand crossed parts of Texas. Naturally, the question was how to get to California quickly. Should one go via the Isthmus of Panama, around the tip of South America, across Mexico, or by way of some overland route w i t h i n the continental U n i t e d States? The more rational thought of horses, pack mules, and wagons, but an ad appeared i n the New York Tribune advertising balloon flights w i t h a polite request to send a fifty-dollar deposit on the ticket. Another suggested using a wind wagon that could 14

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be blown west w i t h a sail; and another, a steam wagon, a locomotive on the loose, as it were. Ralph Bieber has noted that " i n many sections ex-soldiers of the Mexican War persuaded immigrants that the roads through Texas and thence through Mexico were by far the best." Others agreed w i t h the New York Weekly Tribune that the Santa Fe Trail and then a trail across what is now southern Arizona, more or less following the G i l a River to the Colorado River on the California border, was the best route. They were persuaded i n part because during the Mexican War General Stephen W. Kearny had ordered Captain St. George Cooke to mark (not build) a wagon road along that route. Cooke's report on that "road" had just been published. Nevertheless, by February 1849 the Tribune had decided that two equally good routes were by way of N e w Orleans, Texas, and the Cooke route or by way of Little Rock, Arkansas, to Santa Fe and on to Cooke's Wagon Road. A s Bieber has observed i n his history of the southern overland trails, newspapers i n Mobile and N e w Orleans declared that the only way to go was through Texas and N e w Mexico. In fact, nobody outdid the two frontier states of Texas and Arkansas i n saying that the southern routes through their respective states were the best. 18

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U n l i k e the famous central route, Texas did not offer one trail but many. One Texas group suggested going either from Brownsville, Corpus Christi, or San Antonio to the lower Rio Grande and southwest across Mexico to Mazatlán, where one would get a boat to San Francisco. Another group recommended going from E l Paso via Chihuahua and northwest to Corralitos, Janos, and Tucson, and from these frontier posts to the Colorado River via the Pima villages, and then across ninety miles of California desert to San Diego. Still another group urged argonauts to take the trail from San Antonio to the G i l a River via Presidio del Norte and Chihuahua. A n d still others said to go from San Antonio to E l Paso up the Rio Grande to Doña A n a and go over Cooke's Wagon Road west to the G i l a River trail. Texas newspaper editors, who did not even learn of the existence of Cooke's Wagon Road u n t i l January 1849, became overnight experts on the routes. The Houston Telegraph and Texas Register of January 25, 1849, stated that the emigrant route was only 1,377 miles from Houston to San Diego! O n it the gold seeker can "transport his family and agricultural and m i n i n g implements more speedily, more safely and w i t h less expense. Every foot of the route is known, and the high authority of Major Cooke, Major Graham, and last but not least, Colonel Hays, are indubitable evidence of its practicability and commodiousness." A short time later, the same paper exclaimed: " T h e peach 22

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trees here are i n blossom, the grass is springing up fresh on the prairies, and the birds are singing merrily, while according to telegraphic accounts, St. Louis is cold and chilly and winter still chains the rivers w i t h his icy hands and covers the prairies w i t h his snowy m a n t l e . " Another promoter also wrote that it was an easy route. The weather is good, and "General Worth is opening a military road between these points and w i l l protect y o u . " Inspired by such reassuring language, some gold seekers i n every state i n the U n i o n except Delaware and Michigan decided to take a southern route. The captains of these overland companies were generally former soldiers of the M e x i c a n War, or, as Bieber has noted, "frontiersmen familiar w i t h western t r a v e l . " Meanwhile, the postmaster of A u s t i n proclaimed that the natural road from the Gulf of M e x i c o to the Pacific led through A u s t i n . The dreaded disease of cholera having broken out i n both the Missouri outfitting towns and the coastal towns of Texas, as well as i n San Antonio, where General Worth himself was to become one of its victims, the A u s t i n editor smugly said: "The free air of the prairies bids defiance to the diseases of crowded seaports or pestilence breathing marshes of the isthmus." N o one was more assiduous i n promoting his town as the best jumping-off place, however, than Henry Lawrence Kinney, the tall, handsome developer of Corpus Christi. To accommodate gold rush patrons, he built a hotel and a road from the town to the Rio Grande. John H . Peoples, the editor of the Corpus Christi Star, who worked for Kinney, sent ads touting the town and the route to newspapers all over the U n i t e d States. In admiration of the smooth promoter, one group even named their party Kinney's Rangers. Even so, the port towns of Texas were so infested w i t h cholera that some companies, especially at Corpus Christi, lost 10 percent of their numbers before ever getting on the trail. This happened to the company of young John W. Audubon of N e w York City, son of the famous naturalist, James Audubon. N o t only did members of his party die from cholera near Brownsville, but two men stole the $21,000 i n cash that the company had collected to pay for the trip. Two Texas Rangers were hired to recover the money but found only $12,000. From the beginning, therefore, side by side w i t h the reputation that Texas, northern Mexico, N e w Mexico, and the G i l a trail to San Diego represented an easy route, it also came to be k n o w n as the "deadly land" because of disease, long desert stretches, the presence of bandits, criminals, and Apache, and such faint and difficult trails that it was easy to become lost. Actually none of these factors stopped the majority of gold seekers 24

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who, throughout the winter and spring of 1849, crowded the Texas jumping-off places of Galveston, Port Lavaca, Corpus Christi, and various Rio Grande towns. Indeed, because of its m i l d climate, Texas was the starting point for the first overland migration to California i n 1849. Others made Austin, Fredericksburg, or settlements i n the v i cinity of Dallas their jumping-off places, w i t h a resulting business boom i n each settlement. Bieber states that three thousand persons used Texas routes to the gold fields. I would guess that the number was closer to four thousand and that three thousand more crossed the Texas Panhandle on the way from Fort Smith, Arkansas, to Santa Fe. 29

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The first gold-seeking overlanders i n western history assembled at Brownsville early i n 1849 and went by boat up the Rio Grande or by pack trains along its banks heading for Roma or Mier, Mexico, and from there westward to Monterrey or Saltillo. Once i n Mexico the argonauts took a variety of routes but most w i t h the aim of reaching San Diego. These less-traveled routes through Mexico have been described i n Ferol Egan's The El Dorado Trail. I mention them largely because it was over these more obscure Mexican traces that the first American gold seekers reached California i n 1849. Although local newspapers and promoters made gold rush routes through Texas seem attractive, logical, and even easy, the fact was that no clear trails across the western half of the state existed early i n 1849! The most dramatic missing l i n k was any clearly marked trail between San Antonio and E l Paso, or A u s t i n or Dallas and the Pecos River. N o one was more aware of this glaring fault than the promoters themselves, and to their credit they made heroic efforts to locate and develop satisfactory trails throughout 1849. Actually Colonel Jack Hays had tried to locate a San A n t o n i o - t o - E l Paso road i n August 1848, but to his great embarrassment was unable to do so, although he learned m u c h about the terrain and possible routes on that luckless trek. Galvanized by the news of gold i n California i n 1849, Austin merchants joined w i t h Major Robert S. Neighbors and D r . John S. Ford to find a good route. The NeighborsFord party went north and west to the headwaters of the Concho River, west to the Horsehead Crossing on the Pecos, and on to E l Paso. The group returned via the headwaters of the Concho before turning southeast to cross the San Saba and Llano rivers to San Antonio. This latter route came to be called the upper road to E l Paso. 31

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O n the other hand, General W i l l i a m J. Worth i n San Antonio was not satisfied w i t h this route and subsequently sent two officers i n the United States Corps of Engineers, Lieutenants W. H . C . Whiting and W. F. Smith, to reexplore the upper road and then to try to find a better route. The two men reported that the upper road lacked water and rec-

6

Texas and the California Gold Rush

ommended a lower road, w h i c h also came to be called the military road. Before he could take further action, General Worth died of cholera. However, his successor, General W. S. Harney, ordered the lower road marked and developed by Major Jefferson Van Horn, whose train included 275 wagons and twenty-five hundred animals, for he also had instructions to strengthen an army post north of E l Paso. Fortunately for the massive Van H o r n expedition, the able Captain Joseph E. Johnston and the now-experienced Lieutenant Smith preceded h i m w i t h laborers to improve the road. Even w i t h the improvements, it took Van H o r n a hundred days to travel the 650 miles to E l Paso. 35

36

It is obvious that, w i t h the opening of the military and commercial road, E l Paso's future as a major focal point i n east-west traffic was guaranteed. Indeed, Captain W i l l i a m Henry French, Van Horn's quartermaster, became ecstatic over the city's future prospects. E l Paso, he wrote, " f r o m its geographical position, presents itself as a resting place on one of the great overland routes between the seaports of the A t lantic on one side and those of "the Pacific on the other." U s i n g the visionary imperial language that was now a stock i n trade w i t h entrepreneurial Texans, French went on to say that a road of this sort was "destined to change, perhaps, the political institutions and commercial relations of half the world." "It w i l l be a connexion [sic]," he added, "that w i l l strengthen the bonds of union by free and constant intercourse." A n d then he proudly noted that "the government has been the pioneer i n this enterprise." Whatever the improvements, the trails from San Antonio or other Texas jumping-off places were rough ones, but by the end of 1849 one could follow two clear routes to E l Paso and from there eventually join Cooke's road either through the Mexican towns of Corralitos and Janos to Guadalupe Pass and Tucson, or a party could go northwest from E l Paso along the Rio Grande about thirty miles above Doña A n a and join the Cooke road there. Other, more-northern routes through Texas merit our attention. One started i n the vicinity of Preston on the Red River or Dallas and went westward across the Trinity, Brazos, and Colorado rivers to the Pecos, where it joined the upper emigrant road to E l Paso. A s Bieber has observed, this road is distinctive because the majority of its users were either residents of northeastern Texas or were from Louisiana, the latter having come up the Red River as far as Shreveport by boat, while others had gone up the Arkansas River to Pine Bluff and overland to join the northeastern Texas routes. Some three hundred people appear to have used this route i n 1849. A second more-northern route had been pioneered by Josiah Gregg 37

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Texas Crossings

i n 1839. A veteran Santa Fe trader who had described his trail experiences and N e w Mexico and its peoples i n his book, Commerce of the Prairies, Gregg urged traders to follow a Canadian River route that would be shorter than the usual Santa Fe Trail. Colonel J. J. Abert, head of the Corps of U.S. Topographical Engineers, was already interested i n the possibility of locating a railroad line that would follow part of Gregg's route. W i t h that i n mind, i n the spring of 1849, he ordered Captain Randolph B. Marcy to explore a route between Fort Smith and Santa Fe. But as Marcy and his soldiers were preparing to go west, hundreds of gold seekers began arriving by steamboat at Van Buren and Fort Smith, hoping to find a trail to Santa Fe. Marcy was then ordered to protect and guide these parties. Just as gold seekers were following Major Van Horn's troops along the lower military road to E l Paso, so now some 479 argonauts w i t h seventy-five wagons, five hundred oxen, five hundred mules, and hundreds more saddle and pack horses and mules crossed modern-day Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle before reaching Santa Fe. 39

40

Both Marcy and the gold seekers were pleased w i t h the route. O n his return trip, however, Marcy went south from Albuquerque to Doña Ana, the so-called eastern end of the G i l a trail, where he turned eastward. He crossed the Guadalupe Mountains and the Pecos River near the present southeastern N e w Mexico and Texas border. From there he made his way northeastward to Preston on the Red River before going on to Fort Washita and Fort Smith. Always w i t h a possible railroad route i n mind, Marcy thought the trail he had taken on his return was a far better one for a railroad than the former. Parts of it coincided w i t h the trail that emigrants were taking from Preston and Dallas. 41

Yankee Argonauts in Texas, 1849 What did outsiders think of Texas i n 1849 as they crossed the state? The actual experiences of two northern men who chose to go to the gold fields via Texas provide interesting clues. The first of these was Robert Beeching, who joined the Percifor F. Smith Association of N e w York as one of thirty-five gold seekers. The second was L. N . Weed, who was a member of the K i t Carson Company of thirty-four men, also from N e w York. Both companies took the same boat, the Norumbega, to Galveston. The Norumbega appears to have been a terrible vessel, commanded by a drunken captain who served his passengers abominable food. But after a frightening storm i n the Gulf, the 42

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Texas and the California Gold Rush

ship made it to Galveston, where Beeching put up at the Star Hotel but ate at the Tremont House because the food there had the reputation of being as good as the food at the Astor House i n N e w York. I have chosen Beeching as an example, for we harbor such stereotypical images of gold seekers as being crude frontiersmen or rural folk who were prone to violence that we must counter those impressions w i t h actual facts. Most gold seekers were ordinary Americans, many from eastern towns or midwestern small towns and farms. M a n y were middle class, even Victorian i n their moral views, and were often God-fearing. There were indeed rough, violent, gambling, and criminal elements i n the Mississippi and Missouri river towns from Dubuque to N e w Orleans, but these did not dominate the overland trails. 44

Robert Beeching was older than many argonauts, who tended to be youths i n their late teens or early twenties. He was married and had children, was fairly well educated, and was a pharmacist by profession. He was also a good Methodist who took a Bible and Charles Wesley's hymnal w i t h h i m . Because he was a mature and responsible man, Beeching's party appointed h i m and another partner to go to Houston to purchase two wagons and five yoke of oxen and to meet the main party at Victoria, Texas. Neither man knew a thing about driving oxen. O n the first day his partner ran into a tree and broke a wagon tongue. Their near comical situation was remedied when a black teamster, a slave, who had camped near them, instructed them i n the mysteries of ox driving. "We made h i m our equal," wrote Beeching, "and when we parted we gave h i m a trifle for his trouble and the poor fellow was quite affected when I shook hands w i t h h i m ; he could not speak and the big tears were streaming down his cheeks like r a i n . " 45

Throughout his sojourn i n Texas, Beeching was aware of racial and sectional differences. In crossing the Brazos by ferry, he noted that it was kept by a "northern m a n . " He caught up w i t h his party near Victoria, and they proceeded to San Antonio, where they bought supplies and lived i n dread of cholera. They liked the thriving M o r m o n town of Zodiak and voted to get their horses, mules, and oxen shod "at this beautiful and thriving place" rather than at Fredericksburg, about w h i c h they had less complimentary things to say. Soon after they had set out on the upper road, they met Lieutenant Whiting and Captain Neighbors, who were still locating the road but lent them a guide. Beeching's experiences on the upper road were not untypical. A partner accidentally shot himself and died, a phenomenon that w i t h drowning, probably accounted for most of the accidental deaths on all the overland trails. The drownings, incidentally, were not always due 46

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Texas Crossings

to cramps or a treacherous current but to wearing heavy money belts that pulled down the swimmer. Like so many overlanders, Beeching was fearful of hostile Indians, and rumors that the train ahead had been attacked magnified these fears. Everywhere they went messages and notices giving advice were attached to trees for friends, relatives, or others who were following. A s was the case w i t h most wagon trains, they had a terrible time without water while crossing to the Pecos. Beeching's group lost oxen i n the process and at the Pecos lost another party member by drowning. Again, as was so often the case on the southern trail, the morale of the association members was so low by the time they reached E l Paso that they decided to split. But as so many others had been, they were overwhelmed w i t h the beautiful location of E l Paso, its amenities, and the good fruit to be found there. Continuing on by way of Corralitos and Janos, Beeching traveled i n mortal fear of Apache, but actually had no trouble w i t h them. Like a surprising number of gold seekers, Beeching loved the scenery of Texas and the Southwest. A n d when the going got rough, he put his faith in God. 48

49

By this time Beeching's original company had completely disintegrated so that i n Arizona he joined a new group led by Colonel Herman Thorne. U n l i k e so many of his fellow Americans, Beeching liked the Mexicans that he met and even spoke well of Tucson, w h i c h most travelers described i n disparaging terms. Along the G i l a River, Beeching and his companions nearly died of heat. They also lost so many animals that they began to panic, but they finally made it to San Diego and took a steamer to San Francisco, which they reached i n November. It had taken Beeching nine months to reach the gold fields over the socalled easy route. A s he reflected on where he had been, he was f u l l of compliments about Texas, and northern Mexico—really A r i z o n a — and felt they were good regions for settlement. O n the same boat, the Norumbega, that brought Beeching to G a l veston, was an aggressive, suspicious N e w Jerseyite named L. N . Weed. Life was always a crisis for Weed. H i s account of life on shipboard was a h o w l of complaint: " O u r food is salt beef that we judge has been many trips to sea, poor pork, hard sea biscuit full of worms, butter once a day, boiled rice once a week and Duff once a week." According to Weed, the passengers became so angry about the food that they confronted the captain, using as their speaker one G . N . Barnard of Boston. Weed described Barnard as having very long teeth, a short upper lip, an unusually irritable disposition, and language as sarcastic as that of John Randolph of Roanoke. The passengers had already nicknamed 50

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Texas and the California Gold Rush

h i m "Boston." When Boston finished his tirade about food, the captain told the crew to put h i m i n irons, but the passengers drove the crew back and got better food. If we can believe Weed, the captain had been drunk during most of the voyage so that it was a crew of black sailors who somehow kept the Norumbega afloat. What Weed is really telling us is that every ship, whether seaworthy or not, had been pressed into service. During 1849 several hundred vessels landed at Texas ports, not counting the regular packets from N e w Orleans. 52

53

Once at Galveston, Weed's group, the Carson Association, held a long debate as to whether to go by Corpus Christi or Houston and Austin. D r . Bonner, an army surgeon, advised them to take the Houston and A u s t i n C i t y route. For once Weed was pleased because a party they knew who chose Corpus Christi lost twelve of their members by cholera and two by dysentery while "we were exempt from both and healthy." 54

Weed, like Beeching, was religious enough to attend church i n G a l veston but was unimpressed by the city. Without being antislavery, he always commented on the evidences he saw of the institution; for example, he mentioned slave women being sold as good laundresses i n Galveston. O n board the steamboat Billow on his way to Houston, he met Colonel Jack Hays, who told h i m he could get through w i t h wagons i n seventy days. When it actually took Weed's group two hundred days to reach California—that is, six and a half months—Weed concluded that Hays' forte was fighting Indians. 55

56

After purchasing mules and a wagon, now having broken w i t h the Carson Association after having discovered that its smooth-speaking N e w York organizer had not even bothered to come on the trip, Weed set off for Austin. He, too, was taken by the countryside. Nature seemed so bountiful as they made blackberry pudding from the fruit along the route and watched deer mixing w i t h cattle. He was determined not to like Texas generally, however, saying it was unhealthy and that many were subject to pneumonia there. He also distrusted Texas directions, stating that everyone sends you right by his house "to make it appear they live on the main trunk road between important points." A u s t i n did not come out too well either. Calling it "this young capital of the newest slavery state," Weed found eleven respectablelooking houses and about sixty log houses of various grades. A few being made of hewn logs had a comfortable appearance, but of many others, he said, "I could run m y arm between the logs." A l l were badly furnished, he felt, for carpets were few and chairs a scarcity. " A box or 57

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Texas Crossings

a small k e g " is frequently offered for a seat. "Here I saw the first man drunk since we landed i n Texas." Weed sent his impressions of the state to the New York Sun and to relatives. One wonders if young Frederick Law Olmsted read these before he took his own tour of Texas five years later i n 1854. If Weed did not trust Texans or care for Austin City, he continued to be charmed by the countryside, saying that the land was fertile and the creeks were clear. He, too, liked the M o r m o n settlement of Zodiac, run by L y m a n Wright, and was critical of Fredericksburg. Even so, it was at the latter that he and 127 others organized a company under the leadership of one Captain M c N e i l . Altogether the caravan had twentyfour wagons pulled by from four to six mules. The train also included forty pack mules. He recorded that a company ahead of them had 240 mules and sixty horses i n their caravan. N o sooner was the M c N e i l company under way however, than twenty men w i t h pack mules split off, saying that they could travel faster separately. A few days later Weed and his companions found the twenty huddled i n a hastily constructed stone fort, having had a skirmish w i t h Indians. He mocked them, saying, " N o n e were Yankees" . . . but were the blood and thunder of the South. 58

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Weed also had a grim time on the eighty-mile desert stretch to the Pecos, observing that because of scarcity of water and tired animals, their train, w h i c h was usually a mile long, had stretched to twelve miles due to stragglers. This experience, a difficult crossing of mountains, and the excessive heat persuaded sixty men of the M c N e i l company to return to the United States when they reached E l Paso. This faint-heartedness disgusted Weed, who could not stand weaklings. Weed's group reached E l Paso (nearly two weeks ahead of Beeching's group), but there they broke into five different companies of from three to five men each. Weed's group formed the "independent wagon company" and boasted that they had no "captain or leader," but even that group split up at Y u m a . This divisiveness and individualism, w h i c h characterized the behavior of so many argonauts on all the overland trails, undoubtedly reached its apogee on the southern trail, when four men, one w i t h a black slave, who jointly owned a wagon, began to disagree w i t h one another. One decided to saw off his portion of the wagon while the other three were away on a hunt. The slave was present, however, and tried to stop the disaffected member when he began to saw. The man began to beat the slave just as the other three returned to stop the beating and the sawing. The diarist then records one of the choicest pieces of language i n overland trails literature. The 62

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Texas and the California Gold Rush

slave, seeing he was protected, turned on his oppressor and said that he was "a nasty buzzard's p u k e . " A s you might predict, Weed did not like Mexicans and spoke disparagingly of every Indian tribe he met. Easterners, not just westerners, were anti-Indian. After the usual hardships i n crossing from Fort Y u m a to Los Angeles, w h i c h he reached on September 17, he learned that the mines were still 550 miles away. "Jordan," he sighed, " a m not only a hard road but a long road to trabel." He did not reach the mines u n t i l October 26, making it a trip of some eight months. He mined for a year and made $5,000, but after coming down w i t h pneumonia and fever, he concluded that California on the whole was a "stupendous h u m b u g " and returned home via the isthmus. Weed landed at Norfolk, swapped his gold dust for coin at the Philadelphia mint, and on December 3 0 , 1 8 5 1 , noted i n his last entry: "I reached m y friends i n N e w Y o r k . " 65

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Supported by the evidence i n other 1849 diaries by non-Texans, we can draw some tentative conclusions: the first is that the earliest gold seekers were often men of talent, ability, and integrity and that many argonauts who landed at Texas ports were N e w Yorkers and easterners. A s to talents, John Audubon of N e w York was both a fine painter and leader. George Evans, an O h i o resident, who had helped found Defiance, Ohio, had i n his party D r . Lafayette Bunnell, one of the first men to see and publicize the marvels of Yosemite Valley. John D u rivage was a fine journalist from the New Orleans Picayune, and John Robb was an outstanding reporter for the St. Louis Reveille. Some d i arists experienced violence, robbery, and killing, but for others it was a cavalcade of gentlemen on an adventure. That many were proper and middle class is demonstrated i n the notes of John Audubon, who asked a companion he was traveling w i t h and whose habits he did not approve of, " A r e those plates clean?" Answered his companion, "To be sure they are, didn't we eat off of them last night?" For Audubon, it was a sign his companion was uncouth. A second impression is that while there was evidence of slavery everywhere, the responses of both northerners and midwesterners were seldom really antislavery. While Weed was critical of slavery and Beeching was understanding of the plight of the slaves, George Evans thought that blacks were happy and that Texans were extremely hospitable. "That selfish feeling so inherent i n the breast of our Northern men is not met w i t h here, unless i n trade between man and m a n , " he wrote as he passed through Texas from Port Lavaca to San Antonio and on to Eagle Pass. These observations stand as a contrast to the i m 68

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pressions and views of Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled i n Texas and West Texas only five years later. A third impression is that, although the people of the Texas outfitting towns and the U.S. army turned themselves inside out to locate trails and to promote immigration, the southern overland route remained, i n Weed's words, "a hard road to trabel," w i t h a grim trek i n West Texas to the Pecos, another along the Gila, another to San Diego, and a last four hundred to five hundred miles i n California to the mines themselves. In short, nature took away i n the form of aridity, difficulty, and distance what it bestowed i n the way of good climate, relatively friendly Indians, peaceable Mexicans, and a far larger n u m ber of villages and permanent way stations on the southern trail than could be found on the central overland trail. The southern trail experience was a distinctive, even unique one from beginning to end and deserves further study. Where, for example, did the outfitting centers find all those w i l d mules and recalcitrant oxen that drove the gold seekers to despair? Were the wagons locally manufactured, or i m ported? A n d where did their supplies come from? H o w m u c h did the Texas economy benefit from these overland travelers? 73

There are other aspects that need study, too. The Mexican War had set an image of Mexicans i n the American mind that was hostile and disparaging. But the hospitality of Mexicans and the crucial role of their towns i n supplying the gold seekers often contradicted that prejudice. Further, they saw many more Mexicans than Indians on the whole, whereas the overlanders on the central trails saw only Indians and Mormons and not that many of either. In the Southwest, Americans confronted both nature and two cultures; on the central trail, it was mostly nature. Speaking more generally, the Mexican War gave the United States a Far West. The acquisition radically changed the strategic position of Texas. W h i l e still remaining a frontier itself, Texas now had two provinces to its West: N e w Mexico and California, thus altering the angle of practical vision from trade w i t h Santa Fe and Chihuahua to a route to California. That meant E l Paso del Norte was now equally important as the gateway to the West. Overnight, for Americans at least, Texas became "a middle passage" to the West rather than the farthest frontier. The new reality of Texas as an outfitting center and a way west led to some remarkable developments. The U.S. Topographical Engineers improved southern trails all the way to San Diego, and i n the early 1850s U.S. army engineers also surveyed possible railroad routes along the thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallels. A transcontinental railroad 74

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now seemed a possibility rather than a visionary scheme, and i n the process Texas became tied to California i n ways never before dreamed. A s I shall point out i n the second chapter, Texas made its presence felt i n California i n some extraordinary ways, further binding the fortunes of the two commonwealths together. So many Texans gathered i n the little town of E l Monte i n southern California that, i n contrast to the largely Mexican town of Los Angeles, it was k n o w n as "the American town i n Southern California." It produced a set of Texastype Rangers who volunteered to chase down criminals and to mete out justice. In short, Texans and southerners, more interested i n land than gold, participated i n the Americanization of southern California. To the north, the able Colonel Jack Hays became sheriff of San Francisco and later the founder of Oakland, California. Meanwhile, Hays' friend, Ben M c C u l l o c h , also a former Texas Indian fighter, became sheriff of Sacramento. Still another Texan, Thomas Jefferson Green, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, a speculator, and an adventurer, had founded the mining town of Oroville and participated i n the first legislatures of California, where he tried to legalize slavery. Texans seemed everywhere as Lewis Harris, one of the founders of Harrisburg, Texas, became mayor of Sacramento and later deputy secretary of state. In the so-called southern mines, that is, those south of Stockton and around Mariposa and just to the west of Yosemite Park, Texans and southerners settled i n great numbers. But that was only part of the story. G o l d Rush California produced an insatiable need for beef and mutton. A s early as 1849, Texas cattle were beginning to move to California markets i n what no less an authority than Joseph G . M c C o y has called the first and longest long drive i n American history. It is the fascinating and complex story of the crossings of the Texans themselves and their experiences i n California that I shall address i n the next chapter. 76

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Let me close w i t h a sad and final Texas crossing. In 1832 the Yellow Stone became the first steam-powered vessel to reach the upper M i s souri i n present-day Montana as part of the nation's vast fur trade enterprise that operated out of the frontier state of Missouri. However heroic that six-hundred-mile trip was—for the Yellow Stone and all its successors were often frustrated by low water, sandbars, or lethal snags and sawyers i n the twisting muddy Missouri—the trip could only be made i n the spring and summer when the upper Missouri was ice free. Thus during the winter months the very hard-headed and business-minded owners of the vessel sent it down the Mississippi River to carry sugarcane and cotton from Louisiana and Texas plantations to N e w Orleans or other ports. The Yellow Stone, already a me80

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Texas Crossings

chanical agent of empire on the Missouri and representing what Henry N a s h Smith has so aptly termed the "new calculus of western energy," happened to be i n Texas at the time of the Texas Revolution against Mexico, and it was enlisted to ferry some of Sam Houston's troops to the Battle of San Jacinto. In this instance the Yellow Stone was an agent of independence. But almost a year later, after the tragic death of Stephen F. A u s t i n on December 27, 1837, it became the sad task of the Yellow Stone to carry Austin's body a few miles down the Brazos to its final resting place i n the family cemetery at Peach Point. 81

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That event, w h i c h has been fully detailed i n Donald Jackson's recent book, Voyages of the Steamboat "Yellow Stone," epitomizes the theme of frontier mobility: a Missouri vessel was carrying one of M i s souri's most illustrious former citizens to his final resting place i n the new Republic of Texas. Perhaps equally symbolic, Stephen A u s t i n himself had arrived i n Texas for the first time on a vessel bearing the name Beaver from N e w Orleans. It was on that trip that he learned of the death of his father, Moses Austin. What is also striking is the i n credible range of both vessel and man during their brief lifetimes. T h e Yellow Stone plied between the headwaters of the Missouri and the canefields of Louisiana and the cotton wharves of Texas. A u s t i n had traveled and lived i n many places, had been back and forth to M e x i c o and Washington as the fortunes of his colony demanded. The journal he kept on his first trip to Texas is the story of someone i n constant motion. 83

A s extensive as Austin's physical travels were, they did not match the ever-grander crossings to be found i n this remarkable statesman's heart and mind. In 1824 Stephen Austin, an American, had emigrated to M e x i c a n Texas, where—to use the words of Andreas Reichstein— he "thought of himself as a Mexican citizen, as the citizen of a republic designed after a United States." Initially he envisioned a M e x i c a n Texas that would assist i n the building of a successful democratic Republic of Mexico. Thus, for a time at least, A u s t i n experienced one of the most profound crossings of all: that of moving from one's own national culture and language to those of another nation. In the end Austin's dreams for Mexican Texas were thwarted both i n Texas and i n M e x i c o City, for he did not fully understand how different the M e x i c a n federal republic was from that of the United States. Still, without knowing it, A u s t i n was a prophet, for i n this century Hispanic and Anglo-American peoples have mixed and mingled not only i n Texas, California, and the Southwest but throughout the United States. A n d out of the fact that by the year 2020 Latino 84

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peoples w i l l be the largest minority i n this country has come a grudging acceptance that we have a pluralistic culture. Austin's psychological crossing i n 1824 may still be the most significant of a l l Texas crossings.

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They are in large part emigrants from the Western regions and possess that vivacity of character and especially that combative spirit which is characteristic of the American frontiersman. —Frederic Gaillardet,

Sketches of Early Texas and Louisiana, 1846. Translated with an introduction and notes by James L. Shepherd III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966)

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2 A Breed Apart: Texans in the California Gold Rush, 1849-1869

In 1841 Richard Hartnel, an outspoken antislavery and anti-Texas critic i n London, took W i l l i a m Kennedy, the British historian of Texas, to task for saying that Texas must expand and that travelers would soon go easily to California by way of Texas. Hartnel, playing on David Crockett's words that Texans were "more than horses" and were, i n fact, "steamboats," so great was their energy and drive, wrote the following i n a burst of journalistic sarcasm: I now understand how the world is to owe a railroad Connection to the Pacific Ocean to Texan enterprise. These men being on water "steamboats" and on land "more than horses" in fact being locomotive engines, a go-a-head power is ready, whenever a Texan can be caught; his rifle will do for rails for the road; he will seize what lands he may require (as he did in Texas itself and as he wants to seize California); no levels, viaducts, culverts, bridges or other engineering difficulties will occur; hostile Indians will be frightened out of their way by a squirt of boiling water, or a quid from his mouth; he will steam uphill and downhill, at the rate of 100 miles an hour; so that if you breakfast early, he will land you in San Blas, Mazatlan, Guaymas, or San Francisco, in time for dinner at nine o'clock." 1

Building o n Hartnel's association of Texas fortunes w i t h those of California, I would like to explore several themes that illustrate the interrelation between Texas and California i n the years from 1849 to 1869. T h e themes center on the continuing search for the best route west, on the personalities and experiences of Texans i n the gold rush,

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on the cattle drives to California i n the 1850s, and on the lesser-known continued migration of Texas citizens to California after the C i v i l War. I hope that besides following the California careers of Colonel Jack Hays and Ben M c C u l l o c h , you come to know and like some lessfamous Texas overlanders: Nicholas "Cheyenne" Dawson; Benjamin Butler Harris from Panola County; Cornelius Cox of Harrisburg and his friends M r . and M r s . Lewis Harris also of that city; a matter-of-fact cattle driver, Richard Dallam,- a young man from San Antonio named James Bell, who joined an overland cattle train for his health; and two women made the trip overland after the C i v i l War, a nineteen-year-old girl named Harriet Bunyard from McKinney, east of Denton, and a forty-four-year-old wife and mother of eight, Maria H . Shrode, from Hopkins County. A n d finally, I would like to suggest how various Texans actually affected the nature of California society and the early history of that state.

Texan Argonauts in 1849 O n M a r c h 25, 1849, Benjamin Butler Harris, a spirited young Texan from Panola County, East Texas, joined a horseback party—each man also taking one pack mule—and set out via Dallas for the California gold mines. Harris was what you might call a southern gentleman; he had been born i n Virginia, had taught school i n a Tennessee academy, and had studied law before settling i n East Texas. Although he liked the region, it did not seem to like h i m , for he suffered badly from malaria for most months of the year and said he was going to California for his health as w e l l as for riches. This is, by the way, a constant theme i n scores of diaries on both the southern and the central trails. His story was similar to thousands of others who came from the old southern states to Texas, w h i c h they considered the most promising new southern state. H i s migration was not unlike that of the Littlefield family from Mississippi i n 1850. 2

Harris was outgoing, amusing, and articulate. His diary is one of the most delightful we have about the southern trail experience. In preparing for the journey, he bought a huge pair of boots w i t h such long toes that his friends used to say as he approached the camp fire: "There's Harris, just arrived. The toes of his boots got here half an hour ago." H e was also loquacious and orotund i n his writing. When crossing a cold Texas stream, he wrote i n his diary that "the quadrupeds were forced to s w i m the icy, headlong current." In Harris' group there were a 3

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dozen discharged Texas Rangers and a Delaware Indian guide named John Lewis. Since they were led by some of the most seasoned frontiersmen one could find, Harris' and other Texas trains were cocky, and their days were punctuated by jokes and tricks as well as by work. N o t untypical was a notice another train found on a tree while approaching a Pecos River crossing. It said that the train ahead of them had run into 3,000 Comanche, and it being a bad day they had only been able to k i l l 250 and thus warned the oncoming trains to beware of the remaining Indians. Texans knew it was a Texas yarn, but some wanted to turn back thinking it was true. The attitude toward Indians was essentially hostile, and doubtless Harris' companions took the advice of one Colonel Harvey seriously; he advised them to "shoot at every Indian you see and save them the life of misery i n subsisting on snakes, lizards, skunks and other disgusting objects." 4

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A t first the trip seemed a picnic. Game abounded, and they enjoyed a buffalo hunt, saw w i l d horses, and met but did not fight some C o manche. Indeed, they held a dance i n w h i c h the Texans tried to teach a number of Comanche braves the cotillion, though it seems safe to say that the white form of dancing did not catch on i n the tribe. T h e n the inevitable contrast: on the Staked Plains of West Texas, the party nearly gave out and were so desperate for water that when they finally reached the Pecos River, horses and men jumped i n the stream together, drinking and swimming. Fortunately for the Harris party, they met Captain Robert S. Neighbors and Captain John Ford, who were returning to A u s t i n on what was to be the upper trail through Texas. Neighbors provided them w i t h a Choctaw guide, for the trail was so faint that they were sometimes lost. This was not untypical; central overland parties sometimes had Indian guides for a portion of the trek. According to Harris, a number of Comanche and Mescalero Apache also accompanied the Neighbors and Ford party. Harris' dusty cavalcade finally made it to E l Paso, where he enjoyed fandangos and seems to have introduced himself to every young girl he could spot. He also recounted the amorous adventures of a Texas argonaut i n his group while they were i n E l Paso. Harris' rollicking account of his trip via the northern M e x i c a n towns of Corralitos, Janos, Santa Cruz, and what was then M e x i c a n Tucson, along the G i l a and across the Colorado River at Y u m a and on to Los Angeles rather than San Diego is a pleasure to read. He then traveled four hundred more miles to the gold diggings and recorded that he had made the trip i n six months and four days. U n l i k e so many gold seekers, Harris kept notes after the trek. In these we find that of 6

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the fifty-two men i n his party, twenty-one stayed i n or died i n California, six were killed, ten returned to Texas, five to Louisiana, and two to the Pacific Northwest. The fate of the rest is unknown. A t the outbreak of the C i v i l War, Harris himself became a Spanish interpreter for the Confederacy, but after 1865 he returned to California to live. Benjamin Harris' fine account is the more important because the three hundred to four hundred argonauts who began their overland trek to California from the Red River Valley area, where Texas, A r k a n sas, and Louisiana come together, appear to have kept few diaries or journals. A notable exception was Nicholas "Cheyenne" Dawson, a restless young schoolteacher who had been to California i n 1841, but returned to live i n Arkansas. When news of the California gold rush reached the Red River area, Dawson was persuaded by his brother-inlaw and "some neighbor boys" to set out for California. Picking up recruits "at every t o w n , " by the time they reached Sherman, Texas, they had enough men to organize a company. Again, as i n Harris' case, Dawson's party found that they had "no one along who knew the route, so we crossed the headwaters of many streams without knowing w h i c h they were." However, when they finally reached the Pecos river, he wrote that "here we found a fresh wagon road, showing that other gold hunters were ahead." 9

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While on Delaware Creek, they joined forces w i t h an A u s t i n company that had "a w a y b i l l " of the route to E l Paso obtained from Major Neighbors w h o m they had met, but many of the marked waterholes had dried up. "These stretches of dry country," wrote Dawson, " c o m pletely destroyed our organization. Our captains, lieutenants, sergeants, etc., all subsided into privates, and the company dissolved into squads of divers m e n . " Dawson's groups eventually reorganized as a pack mule train and went west from E l Paso via Chihuahua and Sonora to Altar, and then to the Pima villages "where we struck the main route." A t Altar they fell i n w i t h a company of Mexican soldiers "going to the Pacific to guard the surveyors of the boundary line." The soldiers themselves had employed Papago pilots who managed to find water every night. After being rafted across the Colorado by some Yuma, they took "a new road, w h i c h circled more to the south and passed some spots of grass where wells had been sunk by Americans and water found." Dawson did not reach his goal, the Mariposa diggings, u n t i l November IO, 1849. It had taken h i m ten months to get there. Another equally spirited young Texan who struck out i n 1849 was Cornelius C . Cox, who had come to Texas at age twelve to live w i t h his older sister who was married to Colonel Sidney Sherman, an able 13

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Massachusetts-born veteran of the Texas Revolution who had raised a company of volunteers i n Kentucky for that war. It is said that Sherman brought the only flag w i t h h i m to San Jacinto. Sherman has also been credited by some as having shouted the cry "Remember the A l a m o " at the historic Battle of San Jacinto. By 1849 Sherman was living i n Harrisburg, Texas, where he was already interested i n building a railroad. Sherman's nephew Cox, like so many gold seekers, was by nature a wanderer. He had been a clerk i n Houston, had served i n the Texas Navy, and probably was i n Harrisburg awaiting some new adventure when the gold fever struck h i m and a number of townspeople there. A m o n g them were M r . and Mrs. Lewis B. Harris (no relation to Benjamin Harris) and James McAllister. These four, accompanied by two slaves who appear to have been jointly owned by the Harrises and Cox, left Harrisburg to go to Fredericksburg, where they formed a company under the captaincy of Thomas Smith. The group of fifty-five men, M r s . Harris, her children, and the two slaves went west i n ten wagons, accompanied by twenty-five pack mules. 16

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Cornelius Cox's account, w h i c h was ably edited by Mabelle Eppard M a r t i n and published i n the Southwestern Historical Quarterly many years ago, is of special value, for he was an observant, sensitive, and even romantic young reporter. Because he traveled w i t h a family, it is a different story from that of the rambunctious Benjamin Butler Harris of Panola County. Perhaps C o x could be so civilized and thoughtful because M r s . Harris and her two servants set a fine table every night. They also did Cox's washing and generally made life pleasant. H e noted, incidentally, that a volume of Shakespeare was his constant companion. Moreover, Cox liked the company of women of any age and kind, writing that "ladies are the light and life of our existence and their absence is as m u c h felt i n the camp as i n the palace." A s we shall see, he somehow managed to find them all along the route to California. When C o x began his trip to Fredericksburg, he found so many people on the trails that he exclaimed, "The whole country seems to be i n c o m m o t i o n , " and "every town and neighborhood is represented i n the vast cavalcade now moving towards the gold regions." A s others had been before h i m , he was overwhelmed w i t h the beauty of the Texas countryside. He was carried away, for example, w i t h an attractive pink flower covering acres of ground "as w i t h a velvet c l o t h . " Later he found the residence of a M r . Caldwell near A u s t i n so handsome that it was "one deserving the artist's study." A u s t i n itself did not move h i m to eloquence. "Perhaps it was the weather, the misty, murky, disagreeable day, and not the muddy lanes, log huts and 20

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drunken idlers." But whatever the reason, he exclaimed, "I certainly thought it was the most iniquitous looking place I ever saw." N o r was he taken w i t h West Texas: "From the Concho to the Pecos, the Country may be termed a perfect waste." Although he made it to E l Paso without seeing an Indian or a buffalo, he managed to meet the fairer sex. A t Fredericksburg he noted that while there was no great display of beauty or fashion there were some good-looking girls there. In E l Paso he learned of the seven-foot "Great Western," a formidable woman who appears to have been both a prostitute and a wonderful nurse. There he also began to learn Spanish and later, up river at Doña A n a , N e w Mexico, he persuaded three young girls to help h i m w i t h his pronunciation. Later on the route, he had a flirtation w i t h a M i s s Hancock and a M i s s Wayland. A t the end of the trip when most gold seekers were completely exhausted, Cox reported that "Santa Barbara has gorgeous g i r l s . " 23

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Cox's company disintegrated at E l Paso, and a new one formed, but then it, too, disintegrated on the trail between E l Paso and Los A n geles. Some have suggested that was because Texans and southerners were such individualists, but one suspects that it was also because there were so many people on the road that they felt a bit safer. Moreover, there seems to be a difference i n confidence between the Texas trains and those on the central trail, probably because no matter what their social rank, the southern migrants were used to an outdoor life and to moving and pioneering. A good example is Lewis Birdsall Harris, Cox's friend on the trip. Lewis Harris had been born i n N e w York state, lived briefly as a child i n Missouri, moved back to N e w York, and then i n 1836 came to Texas, where he served i n the army. Later he was a county clerk and a member of the Somervell Expedition into M e x i c o . By 1849 he knew as m u c h about trail life and pioneering as anyone needed to know. He demonstrated this by building a boat-wagon for the overland trip to float his party across rivers and streams. Inevitably, he came to be called "Boat-wagon" Harris. A t the crossing of the Colorado River i n 1849, both Benjamin Butler Harris and John Audubon, son of James Audubon, the famous naturalist, used his boat. Harris also maintained a sensible pace, and when it was clear that M r s . Harris was about to have a baby, he stopped i n Los Angeles for the Christmas season u n t i l the child was born and M r s . Harris was strong again. That sure-footed approach paid off when he reached Sacramento, where, because of his Texas experience as county clerk, he became county clerk of Sacramento and later mayor of that city. A n d because Cox could not seem to make a go of it as a miner, Harris hired h i m as deputy county clerk 29

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at $200 a month. In the end it was the Harris family that stayed on. Lewis Harris went into mining and lost his shirt, but nothing daunted, moved to San Francisco, where he began a banking and drayage business. He died i n San Diego and was buried there. Cox's career as a peripatetic Texan was less impressive. After six years i n California, he returned via Panama to N e w York City, visited relatives i n Ohio, and finally returned to Texas. O n the surface, California seems to have been just another adventure for C o x and a better business proposition for Lewis Harris. But we must remember they both came from the ambitious town of Harrisburg, where General Sidney Sherman was full of ideas for railroads. It does not seem accidental that Cox would note i n his diary that this southern route was a natural one for a railroad, or that Lewis Harris would send a letter to the hometown paper saying, "The Texians ought to be awake i n making public the excellent, safe and short route that can be had to the Pacific and the land of gold through Texas." Very early on many Texans had a vision of their state as a major crossing as w e l l as a distinctive place. 32

Texas Cattle to California Although ranching was virtually the only economic enterprise k n o w n i n M e x i c a n and p r e - g o l d rush California, there was not sufficient beef to feed the more than 100,000 people who had come to that state by 1851. Word of the shortage reached Texas so quickly, J. Evetts Haley tells us, that one T. J. Turner of Washington County drove five hundred beeves to California as early as 1848 and that when he returned i n 1849 he "met herd after herd upon the t r a i l . " In 1849 we have reports of between three and four thousand horses and mules and numerous herds of cattle gathered at Fredericksburg to go west, whereas Houston and San Antonio were booming markets for mules. One of the persons engaged i n this lesser-known long drive was Richard Dallam, who kept a brief, even taciturn, journal but nevertheless an important one. Little is known about D a l l a m except that he had been i n St. Louis and i n N e w Orleans before taking the steamer Perseverance for Galveston and then for Indianola i n 1852. Because he does not comment on Texans or the landscape, it sounds as though he had been there before or was a returning citizen. Taking the stage from Indianola to San Antonio, he stayed overnight at the Ingram Hotel i n Gonzales on Christmas Eve 1852. Breaking his customary silence, he wrote, " T h i s is one of the damdest places I have been at for filth and 33

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chinches—so you may have some idea which I had for m y Christm a s . " A t San Antonio he traveled a few miles to the M c C l e l l a n and Pope Ranch, where he appears to have acquired cattle to w h i c h were added mules, all to be taken to California. Despite the constant depredations of thieves and the endless problems of runaway mules, by M a r c h 30, 1853, when he left San Antonio, he had 412 steers and 104 mules. W h i l e there he also bought himself a Colt revolver. D a l l a m appears to have been "trail-wise," for he kept the peace w i t h a party of Lipan Apache by letting them have three steers. Later, as they crossed the Pecos on A p r i l 25, he was met by "a small party of Comanche Indians who came to us w i t h the white flag and we gave them a cripple steer." O n route they traded w i t h a M r . Spencer from Presidio del Norte for sixty more mules, which had probably come from M e x i c o . O n the way to a rendezvous at the Limpia, the future home of Fort Davis, they carefully rested the animals for a jornada. After overtaking other trains on the way, and themselves being passed by the E l Paso M a i l , they reached Franklin, opposite E l Paso, on M a y 13. It had taken a month and a half to get there from San Antonio. 36

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After that, Dallam's train seemed to go west i n zigzag fashion, that is, by various military posts—Fort Fillmore, Fort Webster, and others i n N e w Mexico—where he sold cattle. While crossing Guadalupe Pass i n present-day Arizona, he caught up w i t h a party taking sheep to California. Throughout Arizona itself, Dallam was impressed by the number of deserted ranches they found. Like others he could not understand w h y anyone would allow the Apache to force them off such good land. Near Tucson this slow-moving almost biblical train stopped to rest their stock—now forty-eight mules and 345 steers. D a l l a m records that parties arrived every day on their way to California—settlers and drovers and Spanish-surnamed sheepherders. A c t u ally D a l l a m and his group set up a temporary ranch i n Arizona, for they did not move their stock westward u n t i l September 1 8 5 3 . 40

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Finally, reaching the Colorado, w h i c h they crossed on a ferry, they made it to E l Monte, the settlement of Texans and southerners east of Los Angeles. There they settled into winter quarters not far from the spot where the Santa A n i t a Race Track would be built one day. E l Monte was " L i t t l e Texas" i n southern California, so that D a l l a m and his party must have felt at home there. Early i n 1854 they moved their stock toward San Francisco by way of the old mission highway along the coast, most likely following the route of the first march of cattle into upper California taken first by Father Junípero Serra and later by Juan Bautista de A n z a when he brought the first Spanish 42

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settlers to San Francisco. The destiny of the D a l l a m party, however, was not San Francisco but Sacramento, where they set up another camp and another Texas outpost and sold their animals for a good price. Just as Richard D a l l a m arrived i n Sacramento, John James, a San A n t o n i o businessman decided to drive a herd of 550 cattle to California. James was yet another one of those extremely able adventurous souls w h o m early Texas attracted. Born i n England of Nova Scotian parents, James came to San Antonio i n 1837. A jack-of-all-trades, by the 1840s he had been a surveyor, a fighter against General Adrian Woll (1842), and a sawmill operator who founded San Antonio's first lumberyard. Always quick to see a business opportunity, he sold lumber to military posts and, indeed, purchased the land on w h i c h Fort Davis, many hundreds of miles to the west, was one day to be built. A s Clayton W. W i l l i a m s has noted i n his Texas' Last Frontier: Fort Stockton and the Trans-Pecos, 1861-1895, James was also a business partner of James R. Sweet of San Antonio, acquired ranch lands, and invested heavily i n Fort Stockton. If anyone believed that there was money i n Texas crossings it was James, for, besides renting the land to the army for Fort Davis, he owned "the James Hotel, stage stand, and corrals" i n Fort Stockton. 43

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James' career also illustrates another feature of early Texas settlement. It was a place where persons or groups from both Europe and America continued to come after the Texas Revolution. The German colonists at San Antonio, Fredericksburg, and N e w Braunfels are best known, but French Utopians and a colony of Wendts also came. John James himself financed the coming of a number of Polish settlers and employed some of them i n his business enterprises. A n d , as noted earlier, Texas was also the site of a M o r m o n settlement at Zodiak. Inevitably such a restless, vigorous entrepreneur would be attracted by opportunities i n California; so it is not surprising that he decided to take cattle to the West Coast i n 1854. Fortunately for historians, James agreed to take along a young man, James Bell, who was the son of a jewelry store owner i n San Antonio. Bell was i n poor health and thought the open air would do h i m good. H e also had a brother, Edward, who had joined the gold rush i n 1849. Leaving on June 3 w i t h Mexican herders, they headed for Comanche Springs (present Fort Stockton), where they caught up w i t h another cattle train owned by Franklin and Dean from Bastrop County. A s you can guess, Bell was enchanted w i t h the Texas landscape. In camp near Comanche Springs, he wrote, " N o n e but a poet could appreciate this evening; the rising 46

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moon, the setting sun, the calm sensation, the clear sky and smooth verdant prairie green, all combine to make it the most pleasant, delightful camp we have had during this trip." He said he wished he could be a painter to capture the scene." A s careful as John James was, there was such a scarcity of water between Comanche Springs and the Rio Grande that he lost 75 head of cattle i n the stampede for water. O n the other hand, a herd of 875 head belonging to M i c h a e l Erskine got across the area without losing a single beef. Buying onions, eggs, green corn, and chickens on the way and drinking mescal, Bell observed that they were learning to cook M e x i c a n style. While at E l Paso, Bell, perhaps sensing the long journey ahead, expressed the hope that Congress would soon pass a Pacific railroad b i l l . In ways similar to Dallam's train, that of James traveled from fort to fort on the way. Even if they learned Mexican-style cooking, apparently James did not like or respect his Mexican vaqueros, for an undertone of Bell's diary is that of a constant Anglo-American conflict w i t h the Mexican herders, and i n protest the latter left. Young Bell wrote w i t h some surprise, "The Mexicans are almost as proud as the Americans." 48

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J. Evetts Haley, who has carefully edited the Bell diary, says that 1854 was the high point of the cattle trade to California. We certainly can believe that when we read that the James herd was close upon those of Fairchild, Franklin and Dean, Buck and Bryant, Dunlap and Houston, and Michael Erskine, w i t h Holiday's train three days behind. It was incredible to see the changes on the trail i n five short years. A t Fort Fillmore, for example, the army provided a list and directions for all the water holes farther west. News was never lacking, since so many parties were coming and going. Indeed, they learned of the ratification of the Gadsden treaty while crossing Arizona. Texans now had ranches i n safer parts of that future territory. A t Yuma, on the Colorado, Bell looked at the books of the ferry company and found that four thousand head of cattle already had crossed the river that year. The owner of the ferry was a M r . Thompson who had once kept a hotel in Austin. Bell finally reached California by way of Los Angeles, a town he liked and for w h i c h he predicted a great future. Then, after meeting his brother at San Francisco, the two went to the gold mines near M a r i posa, where he must have continued to feel at home because so many southerners had concentrated there. Unfortunately, his health never really improved, and he died i n California at the age of thirty-five. A s impressive as Richard Dallam's and John James' cattle and mule trains were, they do not quite match those of Major Michael Erskine, 53

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who was born i n West Virginia i n 1794 and had been a pioneer i n A l a bama and Mississippi i n his youth before moving to Texas i n the late 1830s. Always veering westward, he finally settled on a Texas ranch from w h i c h he, too, took a herd of cattle to California i n 1854. More cautious, or perhaps more practical than James, he protected his herd by hiring an armed escort under the command of James J. Callahan. Once i n California the intrepid Erskine invested his profits from cattle i n mines but lost everything before returning to his ranch i n 1859. In 1861 he drove a herd to N e w Orleans to sell but died on the return trip. Those hardheaded intrepid entrepreneurs, such as Erskine, deserve a place i n the history of overland migration alongside the gold seekers. For a brief ten-year period, these cattle drives created a world that was as exciting and as heroic as the one we associate w i t h the long drives from Texas over the C h i s h o l m and other trails to the railheads i n Kansas after the C i v i l War. These earlier drovers had their w i l d west, end-of-trail celebrations i n places like E l Monte or Sacramento. Moreover, they laid the foundation for a Texas tradition of ranching i n southern California, and they kept up w i t h other Texans. M o s t were southerners or adopted southerners whose presence contributed to the reputation California had of being southern throughout the 1850s. It is time we acknowledged both their personal achievements and their cultural impact on California. 56

Seeking a California Home The C i v i l War interrupted the flow of settlers and cattle westward for at least five years. By the late 1860s, however, restless souls and southern families, embittered by the trials of war and the economic and political hardships of Reconstruction, were on the move again. A m o n g those anxious to move on and start a new life was the Bunyard family of McKinney, Texas, who had seen the community i n w h i c h they lived badly disrupted and many of the buildings i n the town burned. In A p r i l 1869 they decided to migrate to California, having been encouraged to do so by friends and relatives already there. Fortunately for us, a teenage daughter, Harriet, kept a journal of their experiences. Although it has been beautifully edited by Sandra Myres, it is so informative that I have used it here. The first thing that is apparent is that the Bunyards were not alone i n their decision to migrate. Harriet's uncle, whose surname was Stewart, joined the group and became its captain. A t Denton, Texas, more 57

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families joined them, making twenty-two persons i n a l l . In 1869 the fear of Indians was still great and the threat was real. " H o w I wish there was no w i l d Indians," she confided to her journal early i n the trip. She probably felt safer when eight more wagons and ten more men joined the Stewart train, but a few days later she heard of fifty Indians attacking herders. Two decades after the first Texas overlanders struck out, fear of Indians was still great. The Bunyard-Stewart company moved through a Texas seemingly full of federal troops. Near Jacksboro federal army officers visited their camp, presumably on a friendly call, but a few days later they searched the camp for stolen federal guns. That Texas seemed an armed camp was reinforced when the stage from Belknap and Jacksboro passed, guarded by five Indians of a friendly tribe. Harriet Bunyard did not like federal soldiers, although she acknowledged that some were "nice l o o k i n g . " She remarked bitterly while at Fort Griffin that the "feds have nice quarters there. The citizens' houses are very inferior—small log h u t s . " N o r did she l i k e blacks. After passing a stage station guarded by a few black soldiers and one Mexican, she said, "It would be a beautiful place if it was only inhabited by nice people." A t another fort near the Concho River, she remarked that "here one sees the colored troops standing around among the yankees [sic], regardless of color or grade." Everywhere the Stewart-Bunyard train moved, there were black soldiers and the presence of the federal government. A t Fort Davis black soldiers guarded the stage station; later the train encountered a group of blacks from the pineries who had been hired by the government to haul lumber to Fort Stockton. These military posts, remarked Bunyard, are a great pest to emigrants. Obviously she did not understand that their purpose was to protect emigrants such as herself from harm. Gradually she began to soften. When at Eagle Springs, she noted that the blacks there "have been very kind to us." Continuing past other forts and stage stations to Franklin, near E l Paso, she was touched when the merchants there treated the men w i t h wine and the children w i t h candy. 58

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If we can trust Harriet Bunyard's observations, it is clear that cattle were once again moving to California. While going over W i l d Rose Pass to Fort Davis, she said that three hundred head of beeves passed them on the way to California. A n d although the number seems excessive, she reported having seen seven thousand cattle at Mimbres Creek and another large herd nearby from Llano County, Texas, both of w h i c h were on their way to California. U n l i k e most overlanders she did not like the Pima Indians, but her reason was perhaps a sense of 68

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southern gallantry, for she noted the men rode horses while the women walked and had to carry the loads. But then she added that lower Arizona was "suited only for Indians to live i n . " By the late 1860s, the terror of crossing both the G i l a route and the ninety miles of desert between Y u m a and the first California settlements had been considerably lessened by stage stations and by people selling groceries at each stop. Near Warner's ranch on the edge of the California desert, she found black families selling cabbages and was so impressed that she exclaimed, "These negroes are wealthy." Finally i n late October, she met her sister and brother who were already i n California. " O h how glad we all are to meet again," she wrote, and closed her diary. Harriet Bunyard lived i n E l Monte until her death 6 9

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Her diary is valuable because it suggests a new theme i n Texas westward crossings: that of being unhappy i n Texas and seeking a new home i n golden California. In this case the push factor was stronger than the pull. W h i l e the older system of overland cattle drives still went on, there was a new ethnic presence: black soldiers were everywhere, and black farmers were selling cabbages i n southern California. That trickle of free blacks would become a flow during World War I, when thousands migrated to California to take war jobs and later to work as domestics or i n movie mob scenes. A new Texas and southern migration to California had quietly begun that became a flood i n the Dust Bowl and World War II years and continues over Route 66 and Interstate 10 today. 72

O n l y a year after the Bunyards had moved to California, an accomplished wagon builder named David Shaw Shrode and his wife, Maria H . Shrode, decided to go west as well. They left Hopkins County, Texas, to go to San Diego, following first the old Butterfield Overland M a i l route and then the usual southern trail. They were religious people, and i n fact, a member of their train, a M r . Settle, regularly preached to them en route. M r s . Shrode thought of herself as an Israelite marching, and when frightened by such things as a prairie storm, she trusted i n God. She was also grateful to her Heavenly Father for getting the cattle across the Brazos w i t h no loss. A t Comanche Springs (Fort Stockton), she was so impressed w i t h the site that she called it a "flourishing little t o w n . " " A l l we need," she said, "is settlers and railroads." If only the poor people of the N o r t h and East knew of the fine lands i n Texas, she sighed. A t Camp Colorado she exclaimed, " O , what a beautiful scene presents itself to the eye. The full moon is rising i n all her majesty i n the East." " T h e 73

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children are playing on the grass, some running races, some riding each other." Elsewhere a team of boys pretended to be oxen while the others drove them. " O , if we could enjoy the trip as well as the children do, how happy the time would pass away." Later we learn that this truly was a train of migrating families for something like fortyfour children were i n the group. A t the Pecos, unlike other travelers, she thought the scenery was grand but noted that it was spoiled by the bones of dead cattle strewed around i n every direction. The favorable image was helped by M r . Shrode catching a twelve-pound catfish i n the river. By 1870 the Texas and southern trails had developed legends of their own about people killed by Indians, or criminals hanged, or attacks on the m a i l coaches. But whether she realized it or not she traveled i n comparative safety because of the many forts, the soldiers, and the number of persons on the trail. Near Comanche Springs, for example, "an emigrant train of seven wagons and a herd of 1300 cattle passed from W i l l i a m s o n and Burleson counties." Another train and herd passed them, and four families were camped near them. Like the Stewart-Bunyard train, the Shrodes went from fort to fort, trading animals. A s one would predict, they were impressed by the Pima Indians on the G i l a River and depressed by the heat and desert conditions. Of the former she said, " O what a field for the good missionary is here and good persevering teachers." A n d of the road she echoed L. M . Weed, the acerbic Forty-Niner from N e w York, when she wrote, " O this road to California is a hard road to travel." But finally the Shrodes got to San Diego for Christmas. Eventually they put down roots; her children went to college, two into medicine and one into education. For the Shrodes, California was not a land of gold but a fresh start—perhaps a new Texas. 75

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Texans in California What impact on gold rush California did Texans have once they had arrived i n the state? When we examine their roles, some curious patterns and contradictions emerge. If we look at who entered politics, it is clear that having been i n the Texas Revolution or a member of the Texas Rangers was a tremendous political asset. Having bravely led men i n battles or skirmishes suggested the qualities of leadership that the voter sought i n a public figure. Certain early Texas migrants to California fit the image almost ideally. Foremost among these was John Coffey (Jack) Hays, who had been a captain i n the Texas Rangers

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at age twenty-three, reputedly never lost a fight i n scores of hostile encounters w i t h Indians, and i n addition to his experiences was a most charming and likable person. H i s Texas exploits had already made h i m a national hero. Moreover, he had known Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk and i n Texas was so popular that he was constantly resisting a public demand that he run for the governorship. 79

Jack Hays' reputation preceded h i m to California, so that when he arrived i n San Francisco he was immediately elected, on an independent ticket, to be sheriff of San Francisco County! Hays soon became a major business as well as a political figure when he invested i n ranch lands and developed the city of Oakland. A n d i n 1859 he helped put down a Paiute Indian uprising i n Nevada. Besides being very bright and having many friends i n key places, he was also familiar w i t h Spanish and M e x i c a n land grants. In short, Hays arrived i n California well informed about its Spanish-Mexican heritage. Texas had been, as it were, a most useful training ground for California. Hays had been a surveyor i n Texas, so i n 1853 he sought appointment as United States surveyor general i n California from incoming President Franklin Pierce. The two men had become friends during the Mexican War. He entered the surveyor general's office at a crucial time, when the fate of California Spanish and Mexican land grants was being decided and when California Indians were being evicted from traditional homelands. Outside of mining itself, land—whether rural ranches or city lots—presented the most promising speculative opportunities of any business enterprise i n California. 80

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A l m o s t paralleling Hays' success as a public figure was Ben M c C u l l o c h , a Tennessee-born veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto, a surveyor, a scout for Jack Hays i n 1842, and leader of a company of Texas Rangers who formed to "serve as scouts for Zachary Taylor i n the Mexican W a r . " Like his friend Jack Hays, he, too, joined the rush to California, where he was elected sheriff of Sacramento County for a term. W i t h Lewis Harris as clerk of the county court and later mayor of Sacramento, the Texas presence there was quite visible. U n l i k e Hays or M c C u l l o c h , Thomas Jefferson Green of Texas came to California to seek gold. He shocked northern men i n the mines by bringing slaves to extract ore for h i m . Opponents of Green and of Sonoran mining entrepreneurs who had brought peons to labor for them tried to get the California legislature to pass a law against peonage but were not successful. Green, never to be outdone, got himself elected to the state legislature and tried to pass a law that legalized slavery. N o r did Thomas Green ever fear to use radical arguments to make his point. A s a violent advocate of the transcontinental railroad on the 83

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thirty-second parallel, he told Congress that if they did not provide one and thereby bind the East and West together, California could successfully secede. Secession i n South Carolina or Mississippi was difficult, he said, because military legions from contiguous states could occupy them at once. But not so w i t h California. It was distant and could get away w i t h secession. Even if the United States sent an army, he said, it would not hold together, for gold would lure the soldiers to desert. These metallic attractions, he said, would cause an "army to disappear like a lump of salt i n a rainstorm." That was said i n 1853, not i n 1860 or 1861. Certain Texans, then, were part of the chorus that made California seem almost another southern state. When one remembers that Senator W i l l i a m McKendree G w i n , who like Hays and M c C u l loch had been born i n Tennessee, led a powerful pro-Southern Democratic party machine i n California during the 1850s and had been i n strumental i n getting Congress to pass legislation to settle the land claims of Mexican Californians, one can see what important roles southerners and Texans could play i n shaping events i n gold rush California. 85

Yet another form of leadership—one which could be called the regulator spirit or even vigilantism—was associated w i t h the Texans at E l Monte i n southern California, where the E l Monte Boys, a local form of the Texas Rangers, stood ready to right wrongs or force people to leave town. A n t i - M o r m o n , anti-Mexican, racist, and violently proDemocratic, they reveled i n lively election campaigns i n w h i c h the spread-eagle oratory of the candidates was sometimes so colorful that it was unprintable. California historians have spoken disparagingly of southern E l Monte, but the few episodes and years of violence there were more than matched by those of middle-class northern merchants who joined i n the San Francisco vigilance movements, hanged people, and drove whole foreign populations out of the city and state during the 1850s. Ironically, northerners saw southerners causing vigilantism, and southerners saw northerners doing it. H i n t o n Rowan Helper, writing of California i n those years, thought all were guilty of violence. Said he, "It requires only one minute for the injured party to shoot the offender, two minutes for somebody to stab the shooter and three minutes for the whole crowd to hang the stabber." If Texans brought a distinctive brand of military-political leadership and frontier-style vigilantism to California, what were some other contributions? Certainly, an important one was, as has been observed before, the coming of a Texas ranching and cattle culture to the C a l i fornia landscape on both a large and a small scale. Hays himself 86

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brought along Texas cattle herded overland by his majordomo, A n tonio. Less appreciated has been the arrival of Texas small farmers i n southern California, where early on they helped produce grains and other agricultural products for the market. Eventually they would move from traditional crops to raising fruit. In a quiet sense, they " A m e r i c a n i z e d " agriculture i n largely Mexican southern California. The impact that seems most logical to analyze is how the Texans took to mining—the reason most had come i n the first place. Because of so little information, one's conclusions must be tentative at best. One thing does seem clear: Texans and southerners seem to have concentrated i n the southern mines south of Stockton and around the towns of Sonora, Columbia, and Mariposa. Curiously this was the area where most Mexicans from Sonora, Frenchmen, and Germans also appear to have located. It is said that all congregated there because m i n ing was largely placer and did not require large outlays of capital. Individuals could survive alone or w i t h a partner or two. It does not seem too far to suggest that the tradition of rugged individualism, i n the Americans at least, was so strong it actually perpetuated placer m i n ing, a form that Rodman Paul has said is the most democratic form of m i n i n g i n the world and the chief factor i n keeping California an open and democratic society i n w h i c h the millionaires during the early period seldom, if ever, got to be wealthy by actually mining. Although Texans must have contributed to the spirit of individualism so characteristic of early American California, perhaps the most powerful i m pact Texas had on California was precedent. It is said that the Bear Flag Revolution began when Americans, fearing that M e x i c a n Californians would punish them as Mexican officers had Texans at Goliad and the A l a m o , decided to go for a full rebellion. In that rebellion John C . Fremont tried to be a second Sam Houston. The evidence for this is rather far-fetched, but the precedent was there. Far more convincing, at the outbreak of the C i v i l War, aggressive southerners i n California, such as Thomas Jefferson Green, felt that they could set up an independent Pacific republic and go it alone, eventually absorbing Nevada, Oregon, Sonora, and Baja California. The latter two had already been subjected to filibustering expeditions of which a number were launched from San Francisco during the 1850s. In the abstract form, then, Texas stood for an alternate kind of independence and freedom i n the California m i n d — a n image that was so powerful it almost became a reality. 88

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If I may return once again to the theme of crossings, the 1850 census for California provides clues as to how many persons i n a typical

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California southern mining county were born i n the South or i n Texas. Ordinarily one would expect few to have been born i n Texas, for its own population had only recently migrated there from elsewhere between the 1830s and 1849. The states that provided the most miners and settlers for Mariposa County were first, Tennessee; second, Louisiana; third, Virginia; fourth, Kentucky; fifth, Georgia; sixth, N o r t h Carolina,- seventh, Alabama; eighth, Mississippi; ninth, South Carolina; and tenth, Texas, of w h o m there were fifty-three. Who were these native-born Texans? They were children born to parents who had just moved to or were crossing Texas when they were born. Six were black females; three were black males; thirteen were white females; and twenty-two were white males twenty and under. O n l y eight were persons older than thirty. Since there were no surnames for the blacks, the probable explanation is that they were slaves. Thus the heritage of Texas i n the gold fields was to give California a new generation that was both black and white and, i n effect, to project a rural southern life-style into the interior of California. It is not surprising that when the C i v i l War began i n 1861 the Mariposa newspaper declared for the Confederacy. 91

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In assessing the role of Texas i n early California, I believe that while we can conclude that Texas projected its experiences and social beliefs into California, so did northerners, old-state southerners, midwesterners, native Californios, Mexicans from Sonora, free blacks, Chinese, and a large number of foreigners including thirty thousand French or French-speaking people. Because of the Texas Revolution and the existence of the Republic of Texas, however, Texans were seen as a breed apart, and indeed they were, for although they were but a segment of a larger process, the expansion of America westward, they had an exceptional capacity to move to anywhere they chose and to take command of the places i n w h i c h they landed. In his 1841 spoof about exceptional Texan mobility, Richard Hartnel may not have been right i n ridiculing their dream of a fast railroad to California. But he was incredibly accurate i n his judgment of the go-aheadism of the Texas people and the powerful impact they made wherever they went. In a similar vein, M r s . Houstoun, the British authoress who viewed Texas largely from the decks of her husband's yacht i n Galveston harbor wrote, "They drive to, and at their end, w i t h greater velocity I ever saw or heard of. Nothing stops them i n their go-ahead career. The present and how to make the most of it is their idée fixe." Even Francis C . Sheridan, after classifying Texans as a nation of debtors and despicable characters, said that he was for recognition and help from 94

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John Bull, i n part because of their "go-a-head s p i r i t . " Charles Elliot, the British chargé d'affaires during the latter years of the Republic, wrote, "These people are rough and wild, but their constancy and courage are admirable. These strange people jolt and jar terrifically i n their progress, but on they do get, and prosper too, under circumstances when our people would starve or d i e . " It is this curious form of what I call Texas democratic imperialism that I wish to discuss i n the third and final chapter. 97

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Stephen F. Austin (1793-1836), American colonizer of Texas and secretary of state of the Republic. Before the Texas Revolution, Austin envisioned shared democratic government and institutions and close trade relations with Mexico. (Unless otherwise noted, all photographs courtesy Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin)

John Coffee (Jack) Hays (1817-1883), Tennessee-born surveyor, became famous as a youthful Indianfighterduring his years in the Texas Rangers. Hays joined the rush to California where he served first as sheriff of San Francisco and then as surveyor general for California. Successful both as a rancher and a businessman, he was also the founder of Oakland.

Ben McCulloch (1811-1862), Mirabeau B. Lamar (1798-1855), viTennessee-born veteran of the Battle of sionary second president of the Texas San Jacinto, Texas Ranger, and Mexican Republic who hoped Texas borders could be expanded westward to include War hero. McCulloch went to CaliforNew Mexico and stretch all the way to nia during the gold rush where he bethe Pacific. He also wanted Texas to became sheriff of Sacramento for a time come an independent nation. before returning to Texas.

John R. Baylor (1822-1894), Thomas J. Rusk (1803-1857), who as an intrepid Confeder- prominent Texas soldier, chiei ate army colonel seized Fort justice, and senator who Bliss for the South in 1861, joined California congressmen occupied southern New Mex- to promote Texas-California ico, and helped create the connections via the Buttershort-lived Confederate Terfield Overland Stage Line and ritory of Arizona. backed federal surveys and support for a southern transcontinental railroad.

Sidney Sherman (1805-1873), Massachusetts-born hero of the Texas Revolution, who, because of his attempts to build a railroad from Harrisburg to Richmond, has been called the father of the Texas railroad system. Sherman also dreamed of connecting Texas to California and the West by rail.

Galveston, Texas, as it must have looked to the hundreds of gold seekers who landed there in 1849 before striking out overland across Texas and the Southwest to the California gold fields.

Austin, state capital of Texas, which in 1849 also served as a major jumping-off place for gold seekers taking the Neighbors-Ford, or Upper Road, across Texas to El Paso.

San Antonio, Texas, major outfitting center and point of departure not only for California gold seekers but also for army units and the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line during the 1850s.

Nimitz Hotel, Fredericksburg, Texas, a stage stop on post-Civil War westward routes. However, 1849 gold seekers considered Fredericksburg an excellent outfitting town before taking the Upper Road to El Paso.

Hauling cotton. Once California and Texas were connected by the Southern Pacific, in 1881, that firm, the Katy, the Santa Fe, and other lines hauled cotton, lumber, coal, grain, and other products to northern and eastern markets creating Texas crossings of a very different kind.

Fort Davis, founded in 1854 to protect travelers on the overland route from San Antonio to El Paso, was occupied by the Confederates during the Civil War but afterward became a major base for black and white soldiers campaigning against the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache. Although abandoned in 1891, its buildings have been preserved and restored and it is now a national monument.

Fort Concho, situated near the confluence of the North and Middle Concho rivers in what is now downtown San Angelo, was a major crossing for gold seekers and other westward migrants after 1849. It, too, has been preserved as a major historical site in Texas.

Black Americans campaigning for Adlai Stevenson in Dallas in 1952. Increased participation in elections by both black Americans and Mexican Americans indicated that both California and Texas were representative of an emerging pluralistic American society after World War II. (Courtesy Hickman Collection, Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin)

Like so many other Texans before him, young Lyndon B. Johnson sought his fortune in California where he worked for his cousin Attorney Thomas Martin for a year before returning to Texas in 1925. Shown here while in California (from left): Thomas Martin, Lyndon, Fritz Koeniger, and Otto Crider. (Courtesy Lyndon B. Johnson Library)

This aerial panoramic photo of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport dramatically illustrates that 'Texas Crossings" to and from all parts of the nation and the world have become a standard theme in Texas life and its economy. (Courtesy Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport Public Affairs Department)

'The Chamizal," the main border crossing into El Paso from Juárez, Mexico, where more than ten million persons a year pass back and forth between the two countries. El Paso is also a main city on Interstate 10, the southernmost east-west transcontinental highway in the United States. (Courtesy Mithoff Advertising Inc., for the El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau)

There [California] is where both the English and the Russians hope to be some day; but we know very well how to forestall them and get there ahead of them. —Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, quoted by Dubois de Saligny, French chargé d'affaires in Texas, 1840, in Nancy N. Barker, The French Legation in Texas, 2 vols. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1971), 138-139

In the cultural sense as in the environmental sense, Texas has always been a borderland or even a shatter belt. —Terry G. Jordan, "A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas,

1836-1986," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (April 1986): 385

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3 Imperial Strategies: Texas, California, and the Southwest, 1836-1986

When George Washington Littlefield provided the endowment to the University of Texas for the lectures bearing his name, he stated that he hoped "persons maturing after 1860 may be given the opportunity to inform themselves correctly concerning the South and especially of the Southern Confederacy" That proviso has made me think of Texas, California, and southwestern history i n the larger context of southern history, i n particular, the role of the South, as transmitted by Texas, i n California history, as well as the reverse: California's impact on Texas history. A s I explored these relationships, both newer and more surprising meanings for the term "Texas Crossings" emerged. A s it turns out, the southern Confederacy played a very important role i n the relations between Texas and the Southwest. Perhaps I might begin w i t h the story of two twentieth-century crossings and then move backward i n time. In the 1920s young Lyndon Baines Johnson, restless, rebellious, and ambitious, struck out w i t h four companions for California i n a Model T car costing $25. A s Robert A . Caro, his biographer, has noted, they called their automobile the Covered Wagon. Johnson and his friends hoped to make a fortune, as did gold seekers some seventy-six years before. But once he had arrived i n California, Johnson found himself clerking for a relative who was a lawyer. H i s dream of becoming a lawyer himself was never realized, and he came home, i n the words of a friend, "a serious boy." M a n y decades later, when Johnson was campaigning for president i n California, he spoke on the steps of the state capitol i n Sacramento. H e remarked, "I am very proud to be i n the home State of more Americans than any other. California sets a fine example for the Nation, because here Americans and Texans live together side by side i n relative harmony. Your State was almost m y home State, too. When I was a teen1

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ager, I heard that California wanted men to match her mountains, so I came out here to apply. But I got a job i n the fruit orchards instead and I went back home to the Texas h i l l s . " Texas should be thankful that his California imperial strategy did not work. Still, Johnson's going suggests both the continuing lure of California for Texans and reveals the "imperial strategies" that he and others had for exploiting that state. That Johnson saw California as a place of opportunity was hardly unique. In 1916 Maury Maverick graduated from the University of Texas Law School and was admitted to the Texas bar. But a year later, he was also admitted to the California bar. After he had served i n World War I, he actually divided his practice between Texas, California, and Washington, D . C . In 1948 he jokingly told his friend, Drew Pearson, the Washington columnist, that "I love m y worst Texas enemy more than m y best California friend." Of course, Pearson immediately printed the remark i n his popular column, "The Merry G o Round." The ribbing letters that Maverick received from old California friends attested to their affection for Maverick but then went on to suggest that the two states had much i n common. The large size of both led Judge M i n o r Morris to fantasize that if the two worked together they could control the nation. Making fun of Maverick's sense of difference between the two, Morris volunteered to be the California ambassador to Texas and suggested that Maverick could be the ambassador to California. Maverick's response was serious and insightful. " T h e truth i s , " he wrote Morris, "there is much i n common between Texas and California"; he felt that both states had similar hang-ups about race. He then observed that, although the public at large thought of Texas as a southern state and therefore antiblack, Texas was southern only by reflection. "We call ourselves southern, but we are not." Without actually saying it, Maverick hinted that both states were more western. "What we should do," he concluded, "is to combine on our economic interests—which interests after all are p o l i t i c a l . " 2

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M y choice of the title "Imperial Strategies" for this chapter comes not only from Lyndon Johnson's dreams of becoming a successful lawyer i n California, and Maverick's suggestions of political cooperation, but from reading several very different sources and texts. The first is one I have alluded to earlier: Stephen F. Austin's 1828 and 1831 brochures i n w h i c h he described Texas as reaching to N e w Mexico and Chihuahua and, indeed, to " a l l Mexican States lying to the West." A second inspiration came from reading Thomas R. Hietala's recent book, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late facksonian America, i n w h i c h he describes the word imperial i n the American ex6

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perience as a desire for expansion, either for trade or acquisition of territory, but not to establish colonies or make other peoples dependent or subservient. In that same study, Hietala, i n tracing the long and rocky road that finally led to the U.S. annexation of Texas, quotes Sam Houston's valedictory as president of the Republic i n 1844: "If we rem a i n an independent nation," said he, referring to Texas, "our territory w i l l be extensive, unlimited. . . . The Pacific alone w i l l bound the mighty march of our race and empire." A n d once when angry at Santa A n n a , now back i n Mexico, he threatened that "the AngloSaxon would march through M e x i c o and raise the Lone Star o n the Isthmus at D a r i e n . " 7

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The third suggestion for the title has been Donald Meinig's Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography, i n w h i c h the distinguished historical geographer at Syracuse University traces the factors that made Texas an empire w i t h i n itself, geographically, culturally, and i n terms of races and peoples. "The state," he writes, " i s not just so many competing regions or counties but a whole cluster of subcultures held together w i t h conscious effort around symbolic dreams, and a sense of destiny." 9

Imperial strategies is also a theme i n W i l l i a m C . Binkley's fine study, The Expansionist Movement in Texas, 1836-1850, i n which he points out that the U n i t e d States, for obvious reasons of its own, wanted Texas to c l a i m land all the way to the Pacific and pushed Texas to do so. That Texans were w i l l i n g is apparent i n an early proposal to charter the Texas Railroad, Navigation, and Banking Company i n the first days of the Republic. The charter stated that the lines would extend from the "door of our birthplace . . . to the verge of C a l i f o r n i a . " Thomas Jefferson Green, that indefatigable adventurer-developer, who was a veteran of the Texas Revolution and whose visionary imagination was often assisted by frequent trips to the bar, asserted that "less than 30 miles of canal were needed to connect the waters of the R i o Grande and the Sabine." Soaring into realms of fantasy, Green hoped that a railroad from N e w Orleans would connect to the canal at one end and then, once the Rio Grande had been reached at Matamoros, a 450-mile railroad " w o u l d land you upon the G u l f of California, at the port of Guaymas, thus furnishing a direct route to C h i n a and the East Indies." Meanwhile, W i l l i a m Wharton reported from Washington that "General Jackson says that Texas must c l a i m the Californias and the Pacific i n order to paralyze the opposition of the N o r t h and East to annexation." Stephen A u s t i n had i n m i n d a Texas trading empire; Thomas Jefferson Green and Andrew Jackson saw Texas as part of a geographically 10

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expanding United States. However, when Mirabeau B. Lamar became the second president of Texas i n 1838, a new element was added. Like A u s t i n , he sought trade w i t h Mexico. Like Green and Jackson, he was expansionist, but he wanted an independent Texas. A s Dorman H . Winfrey has observed, Lamar was "the first major proponent of nationalism i n the young republic." Once he was i n office, Lamar pulled out all the stops i n behalf of nationalism. He talked about the distinctive national character of "Texians" and warned them that, if annexed to the United States, "Texas would be an unfelt fraction of a giant power." Winfrey finds that the second president used all the devices of a political leader to promote a national identity: identification of not one but two enemies of the state—Indians and Mexicans—fostering a feeling of greatness and dreams of empire and proposing a strong army. 14

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What Lamar meant by an independent Texas was a republic that would "extend from the Sabine River and Gulf of Mexico westward to the Pacific Ocean." A s his first step, he tried to persuade Mexican N e w Mexico to join Texas. That failing, i n 1841 he sponsored the so-called Santa Fe Expedition of some three hundred soldiers, merchants, and adventurers who set out to take Santa Fe and to divert the Missouri-toChihuahua trade to Texas towns and ports. A s every student of Texas history knows, the expedition was a failure, and its members were captured and scattered to jails i n Mexico. A s has been noted earlier, Texas never relaxed its efforts to claim lands to the west, including eastern N e w Mexico. However, those were resolved i n the Compromise of 1850 by what most observers thought was a brilliant success for Texas: a $ 1 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 payment and retention of her public lands. Meanwhile, border merchants brought smuggling to such an art along the Rio Grande that Major W i l l i a m Emory of the United States-Mexican Boundary C o m m i s s i o n remarked, "Smuggling having ceased to be a c r i m e " is identified w i t h the best part of the population and entered into the "romance and legend of the frontier." Texans also crossed the border into Mexico i n attempts to recapture runaway slaves, to chase hostile Indians, or i n some instances simply to loot. Periodic efforts to drive Mexican settlers out of certain parts of Texas during the 1850s might also be called a form of ethnic imperialism. A s I have also noted, the discovery of gold i n California not only stimulated the migration of people and cattle to the new E l Dorado but led to many efforts to perfect an easy route between the two states. Urged on by Senators Thomas J. Rusk and Sam Houston of Texas and Senator W i l l i a m G w i n of California, the federal government did make a heroic effort. It was a project that Jefferson Davis, brilliant secretary 16

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of war during the early and middle 1850s, assisted i n every way possible. It seems appropriate to note some of those ways here. First, the United States army tried to locate and improve better trails and roads from San Antonio to E l Paso and then from that city all the way to the California border. When it was discovered that Captain Cooke's and Major Graham's wagon road i n Arizona actually lay i n M e x i c a n territory, the United States bought the region i n 1 8 5 3 - 1 8 5 4 i n the form of the Gadsden Purchase. Opponents like Thomas Hart Benton objected to paying $ 1 0 , 0 0 0 , 0 0 0 for a tract that he said was so poor that a wolf could not make a living there, but the U.S. government did not want a future railroad line running through M e x i c o . During the early 1850s, the federal government made surveys of the thirty-second and thirty-fifth parallels leading west to see whether a railroad line along one or the other was practicable. The common consensus was that the thirty-second parallel was an excellent route even though it favored the South. N o t content w i t h these measures and further improvements to wagon roads, the government spent $100,000 drilling for artesian water sources i n the desert areas of the southern trail. Unfortunately, few of these ever really produced water i n the quantities or i n the locations where it was most needed. The federal government was also determined to protect the trails and located forts on them throughout the 1850s. In Texas, Fort M a r t i n Scott was erected just two miles from Fredericksburg to "give protection to travelers and settlers against Indian attacks." Near E l Paso, Coon's Ranch (the ancestor of Fort Bliss) had three companies of troops stationed there as early as 1849. Throughout the 1850s more forts sprang up, the most important for Texas being Fort Davis, established i n 1854 "as part of a scheme to find a practicable water route through the arid S o u t h w e s t . . . so that gold-seekers, settlers and troops might be assured of water for themselves and their animals," especially i n the vast empty region between the Pecos River and E l Paso. Fort Davis became, i n the words of one of its historians, "the crossroads for horse and ox-drawn highwheeled wagon trains to and from M e x i c o and westward to E l Paso and C a l i f o r n i a . " It was on a major cattle trail as well. Then i n the 1850s, the U.S. army, i n an effort to find sturdy pack train animals, imported camels. Although actually used i n the 1850s, camels as a means of overland communication were abandoned. Some escaped and bred wild, we are told, and for years afterward prospectors, suddenly seeing this improbable animal before them, were so shocked that they temporarily forswore drinking. Again i n the mid-1850s, the Californians, furious at the lack of good transportation and m a i l service to California, sent a monster petition 20

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bearing seventy-five thousand names to Congress demanding action. Here again California's Senator G w i n and Texas' Senator Rusk worked together to get results. Finally i n 1858 an overland route was opened that started at two eastern points: Memphis and St. Louis, w i t h the route converging at Fort Smith, Arkansas. Then it swung into Texas all the way to E l Paso and on across the familiar southern emigrant route to San Diego and then up the coast to San Francisco. Some 2,795 miles long, " i t was probably the longest route of any system using horse-drawn conveyances i n the history of the United States." A p proximately twenty-five of the stage stations were i n Texas. The Texans had been so impatient, however, that i n 1857, a year before the Butterfield Overland began, a stage line already ran between San A n tonio and San Diego, w h i c h Californians called the Jackass M a i l because they used mules. That line melded w i t h the Butterfield once the latter began operations. The Butterfield Overland, w h i c h was an impressive nonstop dayand-night operation, got the mail through i n twenty-one to twentyfive days. But it was not a success. Some five thousand letters a m o n t h arrived by stage i n California, but the steamship lines to the Isthmus of Panama and up the Pacific Coast carried some twenty-five thousand pieces of m a i l a month i n only a few days more time. The Butterfield also carried relatively few passengers, whereas the steamship lines carried thousands a month. You cannot blame the passengers for preferring the water route. The overland trip was a jolting, grueling one. The first passenger, a man named Ormsby, was asked when he arrived i n San Francisco what he thought about the trip. W i t h marvelous diplomacy and ambiguity, he replied that he "felt fresh enough to undertake it again." Indian relations were worsening i n these years so that horses were stolen from the stage stations. Rupert N . Richardson estimates that some 223 horses were stolen by the Comanche alone between 1858 and 1859. The Butterfield ended w i t h the institution of the fast m a i l Pony Express on the central route west i n 1860 and by the coming of the C i v i l War i n 1861. In short, by 1860 every effort to make Texas part of a major highway to the Pacific had failed. 29

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Strategies for a Confederate Southwest Yet a more subtle penetration of the West by Texas and the South had also been taking place alongside all the federal efforts. Between 1850 and 1860, Texans and southerners began to settle along the overland trail i n existing communities, near forts or ranches i n the safer areas.

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You could find them at E l Paso or i n southern N e w M e x i c o i n the region around Mesilla. Others were to be found i n Tucson, at Y u m a , and at E l Monte near Los Angeles. During the 1850s Los Angeles was, i n fact, dominated politically by Southern Democrats, a domination that lasted through most of the C i v i l War as well. When the war came, Henry Hamilton, the fiery and influential editor of the Los Angeles Star, declared for the Confederacy and continued his diatribes about Lincoln and all Republicans u n t i l 1865. Even i n the latter days of the conflict when the South was clearly losing, H a m i l t o n was elected to the California legislature. Although northern California and especially San Francisco carried California for Lincoln and the U n i o n i n 1860, it would be a mistake to think that U n i o n supporters were pro-black or abolitionist. A s Robert J. Chandler has indicated i n a careful study of Republicans and black c i v i l rights i n California during the C i v i l War era, the California legislature refused over and over again to admit the right of blacks to testify i n court cases despite the ardent advocacy of liberal Republican leaders and newspaper editors and organized pressure from the black communities themselves. 35

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Thus, when the U n i o n began to fall apart after the election of Abraham Lincoln i n 1860, and the actual secession of the southern states had become a fact by 1861, southerners i n Texas, N e w Mexico, and California saw a rare opportunity to establish a coast-to-coast C o n federacy or, if that did not prove possible, to create a separate republic of the Pacific, w h i c h would be benevolently neutral to the American South. Indeed, Robert Glass Cleland, the distinguished California historian, has pointed out that the success of the Texans i n achieving their independence led many i n California to think about the possibility of a Pacific republic. If we look at California at the outbreak of the C i v i l War, we find that, although the southerners there probably constituted only 10 or 20 percent of the population, as m u c h as 40 percent of its citizens were sympathetic to the South. That was not too surprising given that the state government itself had been dominated by the Democratic party for nearly ten years. Senator W i l l i a m G w i n , himself a Tennesseean, led a strong pro-South w i n of the Democratic party that called itself the Chivalry. It has also been claimed that John B. Weiler, who was governor i n 1861, wanted a Pacific republic. In addition to the cheers for Jeff Davis i n Los Angeles, about four strongly pro-South newspapers i n the southern mines used libelous language i n their references to Republicans and L i n c o l n . In San Francisco a prominent local minister, who tried not to be mad at anybody, prayed for both presidents i n his Sun37

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day prayers u n t i l his Unionist parishioners told h i m firmly that there was only one president and that his name was Lincoln. However, a series of curious miscalculations on the part of southerners turned California toward the U n i o n and against the South. First, southerners appear to have been so conspiratorial that they were perhaps guilty of talking only to one another. They formed a group called Knights of the Golden Circle i n 1860, possibly w i t h the purpose of creating a Pacific republic. Although we have no proof, they boasted of having fifty thousand members stretching from California to Texas. There was also a supersecret group of " T h i r t y - S i x " who were to mastermind the taking of California out of the U n i o n . One assumption they mistakenly made, however, was that U.S. army officers of southern origins, chief among them, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, would help them seize key California forts and essential supplies. In the end, not only did Johnston refuse to do such a thing—although he later joined the Confederate armed forces—but the pro-Union commanders were very m u c h on the alert and posted troops i n so-called pro-South areas. Moreover, David Starr King, a brilliant and eloquent pint-sized minister from N e w England, used his magic voice to preach U n i o n and patriotism i n the key city of San Francisco. Eventually U n i o n forces suppressed the most radical southern newspapers. Somehow California remained loyal. While both northern and southern volunteers left California to fight i n the two armies, Lincoln shrewdly asked for local volunteers to save California and to keep both central and southern transcontinental routes open. A s we shall see, California furnished the volunteer troops to do just this. 40

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To protect the southern trail, General James E. Carleton, an able if conceited and harsh officer, was ordered to raise a California column and to march south and east to occupy Arizona and N e w Mexico, w h i c h had already been seized by Texas forces, first under Colonel John Baylor and later under General H . H . Sibley. Let us leave the fastidious, well-organized Carleton moving eastward toward southern Arizona for a moment and turn to the Texas story. When the C i v i l War began, the Confederacy received a tremendous boon when U.S. army General D . E. Twiggs, who was i n charge of the Department of Texas, willingly surrendered both U n i o n soldiers and military properties under his command to Confederate forces. Twiggs was a Georgian and accepted a command i n the Confederate army. Particularly disturbing to the U n i o n was the news that Colonel John Baylor had seized Fort Bliss near E l Paso, a large, well-stocked post whose capture greatly strengthened the South. Baylor then occupied Mesilla, the center of the pro-South area of N e w Mexico and, after combining

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that w i t h the Gadsden Purchase region around Tucson, created the only Confederate Territory i n the CSA's brief history. It is interesting that through it ran the southern overland trail. Dispirited U n i o n forces withdrew from small posts and forts everywhere i n the region. A t this crucial point, President Lincoln appointed W i l l i a m C o n nelly, a former Santa Fe trader, as the Unionist governor of N e w M e x ico and asked h i m to raise volunteer troops to defend the territory. Connelly, knowing the dislike of N e w Mexicans for Texans, used as his rallying cry, troops to fight the "Texians" rather than to fight C o n federates. General E. R. S. Canby, head of the Unionist forces i n N e w Mexico, assumed command of these volunteer troops. 45

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Canby had to adopt a defensive strategy, for he actually had few men and fewer supplies. In contrast, the Confederacy's tactics were offensive, and their supplies were bolstered by those seized at Fort Bliss. Moreover, their strategy was bold, even visionary. In the early months of the war, Colonel H . H . Sibley visited the Confederate capital at Richmond and proposed to President Jefferson Davis that he form an army whose units would march first to the Colorado gold fields i n the Pike's Peak area and not only seize gold for the Confederacy but rally the sizable number of pro-South miners there to the cause. A second part of the scheme was to march to California and to effect a similar takeover there. Sibley must have been a masterful persuader, for he came away from Richmond w i t h the rank of general and the title C o m mander of the A r m y of N e w Mexico, and once back i n Texas, he was able to recruit, to use his own words, "the best set of men as ever threw leg over horse." Having assembled some thirty-five hundred men i n February 1862, he advanced up the Rio Grande from Fort Bliss. In some ways the trip seemed a triumphal march. When he met the U n i o n forces at the Battle of Valverde, below Albuquerque, the M e x i c a n volunteers broke and ran. Thereafter, General Canby chose not to fight and to let Sibley take Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where a Confederate governor was installed. Then Sibley and his troops headed northeast toward Las Vegas and the passes to Colorado. 47

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But here again we see a Confederate miscalculation of Unionist loyalty. Rallied by W i l l i a m G i l p i n , the eloquent Unionist governor of Colorado Territory, and a protégé of Thomas Hart Benton, hundreds of volunteer Pike's Peakers marched four hundred miles i n something like fourteen days to meet General Sibley and his troops at Apache Canyon and Glorieta Pass i n northeastern N e w Mexico. In the ensuing battle, called the Gettysburg of the West, the Confederates were defeated when a U n i o n detachment crept behind Sibley's lines, seized their supplies, and slaughtered their draft animals. Sibley's troops, al-

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ready overextended, were not only short of supplies but his men were suffering from smallpox and pneumonia. Forced to retreat, Sibley unwisely decided to take a short cut across the desert to Fort Bliss. In that march his men suffered terribly from a lack of water. By the spring Sibley was back at Fort Bliss trying to justify what he called his "retrograde movement" w i t h various explanations, one of w h i c h was that his men had formed a detestation of N e w Mexico and its peoples. 49

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A s Sibley retreated, General Canby, who had played a waiting game all along, followed h i m down the Rio Grande and reoccupied m u c h of the N e w Mexico that Sibley and Baylor had originally taken. But Canby's accomplishment was soon to be eclipsed by the advance of General Carleton and the fourteen hundred California volunteers that he had recruited. By summer 1862 Carleton had recaptured Tucson, arrested southern sympathizers there, and had, i n effect, closed down the Confederate Territory of Arizona. Then he continued to Santa Fe and Las Vegas. A strong-willed histrionic officer, he soon overshadowed c i v i l officials i n Santa Fe and became the virtual dictator of Unionist N e w Mexico for the next four years. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress, having learned that gold- and silver-bearing areas existed i n northwestern N e w Mexico, created the federal Territory of Arizona i n February 1863, just one year after Sibley had invaded N e w M e x i c o . The Confederate dream of a Gulf-to-Pacific empire was at an end, it seemed. But was it? 51

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In 1864 one Lansford Hastings appeared i n Richmond to argue that he could raise some three to five thousand pro-South men who, disguised as miners, could penetrate N e w Mexico and Arizona and then, showing their true colors, rise and recapture these two areas and reestablish a corridor to California, where, one assumes, the South expected to find at least gold i n support of the Confederate cause. A s we all know, this scheme never came to fruition. Yet the hopes of the South for domination i n the Southwest were still alive. In A p r i l 1864 one Captain H . Kennedy, C S A , left San Antonio, so the war records of the C i v i l War tell us, to travel through Mexico and then to San Francisco, where under a false identity he made contact w i t h certain southern sympathizers. Kennedy then went to Nevada, where many of the miners were pro-South. It appears that he planned to organize these men, march overland to Prescott, Arizona, seize the newly discovered mines there and declare for a new Confederate Arizona. But someone breached Kennedy's secrecy so that he was forced to hide i n the C a l i fornia hills for safety. However, i n the period he was there, a gold-laden Wells Fargo stage was robbed at Placerville and a note was left i n the box stating that the gold had been taken for the Confederate cause. 53

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Meanwhile, Kennedy appears to have recruited thirty men to return w i t h h i m to Texas to fight for the South. If Kennedy's report is to be believed, near Presidio del Norte, a U n i o n force encountered them and i n the shoot-out some seventeen of the thirty Confederates were k i l l e d or wounded. A t least one California historian feels that the Kennedy mission was part of a last-ditch attempt of the Confederacy to assert itself because at almost the same time there was a dramatic raid on a Vermont bank by a Confederate group, an effort to capture the one U.S. naval vessel sailing on the Great Lakes, an attempt to burn N e w York City, and a desperate effort by Confederate prisoners to break out of Camp Douglas, their prison camp i n Chicago. None of the schemes worked, and Captain Kennedy himself mysteriously disappeared from view. I have recounted this m u r k y narrative i n some detail, for it suggests the role that gold and gold mines played i n the thinking both of the money-poor Confederate government and of Texans. Here gold became mixed w i t h military aims and the older dream of a Gulf-to-Pacific empire. I mention it as well, for some historians say that California gold was the key to the credit of the Lincoln government i n the war years. Certainly, the psychological impact of knowing that most of the gold was on the U n i o n side was a powerful one. It was the gold of California, wrote the Overland Monthly i n 1869, that struck the fatal blow to slavery i n the United States. Whether true or not, it was a real factor, or the Confederacy would not have tried so hard to take over California and Colorado or scheme to take Arizona back once gold and silver had been found at Prescott i n 1 8 6 2 - 1 8 6 3 . 54

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Indians and Comancheros in West Texas If Texas' imperial strategies were blunted by military reverses during the C i v i l War, so were the efforts of its pioneer settlers and ranchers to expand into present West Texas and the Texas Panhandle after that conflict. In the Staked Plains east of N e w Mexico, ancient crossings of a very different k i n d had been going on since 1000 A . D . between the Pueblo and the Plains tribes that would slow the westward thrust of Texas pioneers. To reduce a complex trading relationship to its simplest terms: long before Coronado or any other Spanish intruder appeared i n the Southwest, the Pueblo traded corn and blankets to the Plains tribes for meat, skins, and flint knives, most frequently at the eastern Pueblo outpost at Pecos but also at Taos and Picuris. Indeed, Charles L. Kenner asserts 56

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that Pecos became "the chief center for the western diffusion of trade goods from the buffalo country." When D o n Juan de Oñate arrived on the Rio Grande w i t h his Spanish colonists, he found trade i n buffalo robes "quite b r i s k . " Unfortunately, the Spanish disrupted what was never an easy Pueblo-Plains trade relationship by increasing slave raids on Plains tribes. In time Plains tribes, and especially the Apache themselves, brought captives taken from the more eastern Caddoan tribes to trade for goods and horses. N e w Mexicans then sold the slaves to mine owners i n Nueva Viscaya to work i n the mines there. Beginning i n the eighteenth century, Comanche competed w i t h the Apache to be the chief Plains traders. In 1786, after many ruthless conflicts, Governor Juan Bautista de A n z a of N e w Mexico achieved a peace between the Spanish N e w Mexicans and the Comanche that lasted until 1846. 57

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During what Kenner has called a remarkable period of stability between 1786 and 1860, the so-called Comanchero trade developed i n w h i c h N e w Mexico's Spanish and Pueblo traders penetrated the Plains to take their goods right to the Comanche camps. Again, as Kenner has observed, by the 1840s "the Comanchero traffic had so broadened the pack trails observed by Stephen H . Long i n 1820, that they could be called full-fledged cart roads. To pay for the bread, flour, cornmeal, sugar, tobacco, and dry goods that the Comancheros brought to the Plains camps, the Plains Indians furnished N e w Mexico w i t h horses, mules, buffalo robes, and meat. This trade reached into parts of modern-day Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma and southeast all the way to the Davis Mountains. Thus the crossings of Texans into southern N e w Mexico were matched by Comancheros crossing into Texas. Further, the Comanche, Kiowa, eastern Apache and other tribes raided Mexican settlements to the south for captives and horses and also began to raid Texas farmers and ranchers. So ruthless were they that they became i n Richardson's terms, the "Comanche barrier" to the expansion of the Texas frontier. The Plains Indians' seizures of Texas cattle were so widespread that Kenner has called it the "Great Comanchero Cattle Trade," a dramatic if nefarious business that ended only when the Red River War of 1 8 7 4 - 1 8 7 5 brought the Comanche under control. A t that point another less visible and more peaceful eastward crossing occurred as Hispanic N e w Mexicans quietly spread into Northwest Texas to settle. This process, along w i t h that of the era of Comanchero, represented a reversal of imperial strategies i n the sense that the expansionists were Hispanics and Indians rather than Anglo-Texans. 61

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A Railroad at Last! After the C i v i l War, dissatisfied Texans continued to migrate i n small numbers to California, and an overland cattle trade continued as well, but the spectacular rise of the long drive to the Kansas railroad towns i n 1867 and thereafter quickly eclipsed these and a l l other cattle drives. In turn they publicized the cowboy, whose image as a restless, unattached, brave youth soon became a mythic hero to Americans and eventually an American stereotype recognized and admired throughout the world. Here again, a chief feature of the cowboy's life was that he was an unattached hero, always on the move. 68

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Ironically, one factor i n the success of the wonderful open range cattle industry was the railroad, w h i c h Texans had thought from the beginning of the Republic was the secret weapon by w h i c h they could realize their wildest dreams. In 1841 a senator i n the Texas legislature said, "I tell you, gentlemen, railroads are the one key that Texas has to unlock her casket of costly gems." Yet as one Texas historian put it, " T h e Republic of Texas lived and died without ever hearing the whistle of a locomotive." 70

N o one felt more strongly that railroads were the answer than General Sidney Sherman, veteran of San Jacinto and one of the first settlers of Harrisburg, that one-time urban rival to Houston. The Texas Almanack of 1858 called Sherman the "father of the railroad system i n the state," for i t was he who helped develop the first rail line—some twenty miles by 1853. Appropriately, the first locomotive on that line was called the General Sherman. Between 1852 and 1856, the legislature granted seventy-five charters for Texas railroads, but none of them moved beyond the state's borders. This failure was certainly not due to lack of interest. Railroad conventions were held i n the state and throughout the South during the 1850s, and the Texas legislature itself passed a general railroad act i n 1854, the same year that Governor E. M . Pease was reelected to office partly because of his railroad-building policies. It would be misleading to say that railroads were the dominant political issue, for by the late 1850s the slavery question and strong opposing personalities held front stage, as was the case when Hardin Richard Runnels ran for governor against Houston i n 1857 and won, giving Houston his only political defeat. But even so, part of Runnels' platform argued that the Texas population was too sparse to support railroads, and besides railroads were all a scheme of speculators anyway. Thus Texas came to the C i v i l War w i t h no trans-Texas or transcontinental railroad. Gover71

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nor Runnels was right: Texas had been defeated by its own size and space. After the C i v i l War, Texas entered a period i n w h i c h the expansionist urge came from elsewhere: that is, Texas did not build railroads to other areas; builders i n other areas built toward Texas. A s M e i n i g has observed, this outside railroad development "marked the intense struggle between a provincial and a national system. The integrity of Texas as an empire and a culture was at stake." In the 1870s and 1880s, the brilliant Thomas A . Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad tried to make the Texas and Pacific the instrument by w h i c h the Pennsylvania Railroad would run to the California coast. Scott's grandiose plan was stopped both by Congress' refusal to grant lands for the project and by the Panic of 1873. Meanwhile, Collis P. Huntington had extended the Southern Pacific, originally chartered to go only from San Francisco to San Diego, to the Arizona line near Yuma, and next he bribed the Arizona legislature to grant h i m right of way across the territory, a right of way that presumably belonged to the Texas and Pacific. After Governor Anson P. K. Safford of Arizona had softened up the legislature to vote for Huntington's right of way, the governor returned some of the money, saying that Arizona legislators could be bribed w i t h smaller sums than elsewhere. Huntington himself was never bothered by the immorality of bribery, saying that if you know you are right it is worth paying for it. 74

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Huntington was unstoppable. Initially proceeding without a land grant, his Southern Pacific i n M a r c h 1881 reached Deming, N e w M e x ico, where he joined the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, an act that benefited both roads but had the effect of keeping Santa Fe lines out of California for some years. Proceeding eastward (and having already bought a line running from N e w Orleans into Texas), he had reached and passed E l Paso when Jay Gould, controller of the Texas and Pacific and owner of most Texas lines by 1881, decided to join Huntington rather than fight h i m . In a historical agreement, the two lines—as we know so well from standard Texas histories—met and joined at Sierra Blanca some eighty-five miles east of E l Paso and agreed to a joint ownership of the track from there to E l Paso and free access of one line to the other. Thus twelve years after the U n i o n Pacific had reached California and some thirty years after Texas had demanded a Pacific line of its own, the Southern Pacific made that dream a reality. It is perhaps symbolic that i n 1883, the first time a train actually ran all the way from San Francisco to N e w Orleans, it carried fifty barrels of C a l i fornia wine from A . Harazsty and Company of San Francisco. N e w Orleans has been a more civilized place ever since. 77

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Between 1881 and 1893, w i t h the penetration of the Southern Pacific, the Santa Fe, the Katy, and other lines, Texas now had a connection w i t h the entire Southwest and w i t h the nation. By 1893 the roads were carrying lumber, coal and coke, livestock, cotton, grain, and petroleum and other oils i n large quantities w i t h lumber being first i n volume. In a dramatic reversal of conditions, by 1893 Texas actually had more miles of railroad track than any other state i n the U n i o n ! However, it should be remembered that an outsider, a Californian, realized the Texas dream of a transcontinental railroad. Further, this reversal of the imperial impulse, plus the problems of discriminatory freight rates, local agricultural distress, and a hundred other economic and political factors led Texas to become anti-imperialistic during the Populist and even the progressive years—an abandonment of imperial strategy that represents a dramatic turnabout i n attitude. It is also interesting to see i n the p o s t - C i v i l War years how an old Texas dream, that of the Santa Fe trade, was reversed so that when Texas cattle were shipped on the Santa Fe lines to St. Louis and C h i cago and, i n the years 1 8 6 6 - 1 8 8 6 , St. Louis also began to attract Texas and Arkansas cotton to its market. There were indeed many ironic twists to the age-old Texas dream of by-passing M i s s o u r i . 79

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Parallel Industrial and Demographic Changes The impact of Texas o i l discoveries, especially those at Spindletop i n 1901 and the East Texas fields i n 1930, brought remarkable changes to the Texas economy and to Texas life. These have been so w e l l covered that they need not be treated here. The significance of Spindletop, writes M e i n i g , was that it kept "generating great amounts of local wealth, controlled by Texans who i n turn invested i n Texas. That, i n turn, created a new rich class, new degrees of financial independence, and thus brought a new manifestation of cultural self-consciousness and commercial i m p e r i a l i s m . " Put another way, o i l gave Texas, for the first time, "a war chest" to practice imperial dreams. What is of equal significance, however, is that this fabulous history of o i l discovery and exploitation was more or less paralleled i n California when it discovered its other mineral, "black gold" i n 1892 i n the Los Angeles area—nine years before Spindletop. Then i n the early twentieth century, new fields were found i n the San Joaquin Valley, and i n the 1920s a still larger area was discovered i n the Huntington Beach and Long Beach area. Finally, i n 1937—eight years after the East Texas discovery—a huge deposit was discovered at Wilmington, C a l i 82

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fornia. Thus i n parallel ways California, like Texas, found an economic basis that would allow it to move even further to the front of economic domination i n the West and to move toward industrialization and to massive urbanization as well. Further, both competed i n a national market for sales of gasoline and o i l . There were also hundreds of other parallel experiences beyond size, wealth, climate, and agricultural production i n the two states. The population of both states was multiracial. In 1900 California, EuroAmericans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese Americans made up the bulk of the population. Texas was Anglo-American w i t h a significant black population but only 4 percent of its residents were Hispanic. However, after 1900 the Hispanic populations of both states, and of Arizona and N e w Mexico as well, were augmented by a large number of migrants from Mexico itself. In the years between 1900 and 1930, the northward crossings into Texas and California were more significant than the westward ones. A s Terry Jordan has observed, by 1948 "persons of Hispanic ancestry surpassed blacks i n number to become the largest ethnic minority i n Texas." A t the same time, the booming economy of southern California led more and more black Americans from the South and Texas to the coast. Their first major employer i n California was the railroad. A n other influx occurred during World War I i n which blacks were drawn to the Los Angeles area w i t h the promise that they could own their own homes and gardens, ironically laying the foundations for the suburb of Watts. W i t h migrations continuing through the next forty years, by 1960 the black population of California had jumped from a usual 1 percent to 5.6 percent of the population, which was concentrated largely i n the Los Angeles area, making it the sixth largest urban black community i n the United States. 83

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The Newer Crossings: Texas and the American West Even so, the best-known migration i n the twentieth century was that of the small desperate farmers from the cotton areas of Arkansas, M i s souri, Oklahoma, and Texas during the Great Depression years of the 1930s. Despite the efforts of hundreds of historians to correct the mistaken impression that the so-called Okies, the generic name applied to persons from all of the four states, came from the Dust Bowl area of the southern Great Plains, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath has i n delibly associated them w i t h the more western region. It is true that the Dust Bowl, which embraced part of the Texas Panhandle, was dev87

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astated by the wrath of nature i n the form of drought and dust and that many of its residents fled. But just as often the migrants to California came from the cotton lands to the east, where mechanization and corporate farming, more than drought, forced tenants and little farmers to migrate. Walter J. Stein, historian of the Dust Bowl migration, has noted some tragic ironies i n this latest Texas-to-California crossing. He has written that "more than any other state i n the union, California owes its prosperity and affluence to continuing streams of migrants. For a century the state has viewed the entire United States as its eastern hinterland from whence new arrivals bring fresh treasure and new blood. O n l y once has California lost its accustomed good temper w i t h migrants and, i n many ways, the anti-Okie hysteria of the depression years was paradoxical . . . for migration i n the 1930s was relatively smaller than at any other time i n the state's history." A n d "curiously the ones they opposed—the so-called Okies were from old stock Protestant families, were white, and settled i n the rural areas of the state." Because most of the Okies came i n a brief surge before 1938, it gave the impression of their overwhelming California, whereas the wholesale entry of midwesterners into the state from the Midwest between 1900 and 1920 was, i n the words of Stein, "one of the most prodigious migrations i n the annals of American Westering." Indeed, he concludes that their coming "really accounts for the economic takeoff of California i n the twentieth century." What is important for us to understand is that here was the first major peacetime movement of Texas peoples that was not voluntary or i n any way imperial. It was also the first by automobile. Again, as Stein has noted, the reasons the Okies came were freight rates, a mechanized cotton culture that ended the need for most tenants, acreage restrictions, drought, soil depletion, and low farm income. The Depression itself, he concludes, was not a cause "but the final straw." T h i s sentiment was caught i n a ballad that was making the rounds i n 1939: 88

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How well do I remember that good old Texas land, Where I lingered on starvation until I was a man. Don't let anyone fool you and lead you to harm, For you sure can't make a living on a forty acre farm. So when I see Old Texas one thing I truly hope: It will be from California through a long-range Teliscope.

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Strangely, this highly publicized migration, w h i c h the public learned about from Steinbeck, Dorothea Lange's graphic photos, and eloquent

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books by Carey M c W i l l i a m s and Paul S. Taylor, lacks its historian for the California years after 1940. In regard to the migration of Texans, Oklahomans, Missourians, and Arkansans, of w h o m the Texans were never more than a fourth of the group i n terms of impact, it is an often overlooked fact that these rural farm people came to California not for welfare or because it was the land of m i l k and honey but to do what they had done at h o m e — farm and pick cotton. They settled i n farm areas w i t h that i n mind. Further, as Stein has also pointed out, they came to settle and not to be migrant workers and i n so doing forced Californians, who were used to seeing their transient Mexican labor disappear over the horizon after a crop was harvested, to consider the presence of a new permanent population. By concentrating i n farm communities i n the San Joaquin Valley, the Okies southernized some regions just as Texans and southerners had affected the southern gold-mining district nearly a century before. One statistic should suffice to make the point. In Tulare County, California, the schools suddenly found they had 128 children from Oklahoma, 48 from Arkansas, and 42 from Texas, a rough indicator of the proportion of migrants coming from these states. 93

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In Texas after Spindletop, Seth S. M c K a y and Odie B. Faulk write that, after the confusion and depression of the 1930s, Texas, like C a l i fornia, " f o u n d " itself again i n World War II, as did the Pacific Northwest and the entire Southwest. Once more Texas cities were i n boom as i n the gold rush days or during the years before the C i v i l War. W i t h the T h i r d and Fourth armies headquartered at San Antonio and the national headquarters of the A i r Force Training Command i n Fort Worth, w i t h the aircraft and petrochemical industries coming of age, Texas itself became an empire w i t h i n a republic. Non-Texans introduced to the good climate and to the charms of E l Paso and San Antonio and dozens of other cities returned after the war for a place i n the Texas sun. One would think that by the 1970s and 1980s, given the continuing pride i n being Texan and therefore i n being a breed apart (a point M e i n i g makes at the close of his book Imperial Texas) and w i t h the revitalized sense of place that makes Texans invest i n Texas (to the despair of fund-raising private schools like Yale and Harvard), it is time to place the concept of crossings on the shelf. Nevertheless, the crossings go on i n newer ways. In the 1950s, for example, the E l Paso Gas Company looked northwest to develop gas and o i l i n the Four Corners area. Then i n the 1970s that firm, looking farther north, proposed to build pipelines to carry gas i n liquefied form from Prudhoe Bay to the Alaskan coast and then 96

97

98

56

Imperial Strategies

by tanker to California. The older name, E l Paso del Norte, had taken on a grander and more imperial meaning while at the very same time its oldest meaning still had validity as seen i n the statistic that i n the 1970s there were several m i l l i o n recorded crossings a year at the M e x i can American border at E l Paso. Niles Hansen, writing i n The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest, concludes that the relations of M e x i c o to the southwestern states of Texas, N e w M e x ico, Arizona, and California and those among themselves have become so intimately intertwined that the relation has become a symbiotic rather than one-sided exploitation of mutually hostile attitudes. Indeed, when one sees the powerful presence of Texas i n N e w Mexico, the Four Corners area of Utah, and Colorado today and notes its connections to Mexico, the old dream of trade and penetration voiced by Stephen A u s t i n , the merchants of the Santa Fe Expedition, and generations of expansionists has come true but not i n a form predicted by any. 99

100

Meanwhile, the leading o i l firms and the o i l centers of Texas have had their impact on the Canadian West as the o i l and petrochemical industries have boomed i n Alberta, so m u c h so that we read that the city of Calgary cannot decide whether it is a cowtown w i t h its C a l gary Stampede, or an o i l capital w i t h three hundred or more o i l and gas companies, or a financial and industrial center like Houston and Dallas. Edmonton, whose financial base was once agriculture, is now also an o i l and petrochemical center i n a big way and ships gas to C a l i fornia. If there is a message here, it is that Texans have been the pioneers or the pacesetters for these new big-time industrial and imperial wests. They have, w i t h Californians, had a larger vision that reaches everywhere just as the American railroads did i n the nineteenth century. In addition to being an industrial pacesetter, Texas continues to capture the imagination and to manufacture myths, as D o n Graham of the University of Texas has demonstrated i n his book Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas. H e notes that H o l l y wood's mythic Texas has been described i n the crossing of the Red River, the siege of the Alamo, Texas Crude (i.e., the T V series, Dallas), and a picture of the " U g l y Texan." Certainly Howard Hughes' career, both here and there, has sustained and enriched such myths. N o r should one fail to note that i n his final crossing, i n 1976, Hughes died on a flight from M e x i c a n Acapulco to Houston. A s Texas reaches into the Southwest and California, or north to Alaska and Canada, as well as into so many other regions and overseas, one should ask how and w h y this has happened. Beginning w i t h an as101

102

103

57

Texas Crossings

sertion of independence i n 1836, Texans have indicated what a truly independent spirit can do. It has been a free spirit full of paradoxes— at once democratic and imperial, but always mobile and changing—so m u c h so that this is why I have chosen to identify this drive—this "goa-headism" that every foreign visitor commented on i n the 1830s and 1840s—as "Texas Crossings." C . Vann Woodward has said that the South has a sense of place, of roots. Texas, as we have already noted, has that sense many times over, but it has always been a place of crossings as w e l l : Cabeza de Vaca passing through E l Paso over 450 years ago, desperately seeking his countrymen; Austin seeking a new land and life nearly 300 years later; Houston and a thousand other adventurers and exiles groping toward a destiny that did not become apparent u n t i l tested by battle; gold seekers and settlers passing through Texas for California. Texas, then, is a symbol of free people coming and going, a mobility that we associate w i t h the frontier, a right sometimes granted grudgingly, as we see i n the debates over admitting boat people to the state. Such crossings continue today i n a m i l l i o n forms: tourists on Interstate 10 going west or east, the world passing through the D a l l a s - F o r t Worth airport, several m i l l i o n people a year crossing at E l Paso, and others, all suggest that the American trait of m o b i l i t y — a form of freedom—should be yet another reason for celebrating this sesquicentennial year w i t h a special fervor. It suggests a larger vision of Texan, southern, western, and, indeed, American history. It is, I trust, a theme appropriate to the wishes of George Washington Littlefield, who himself came from the South, settled i n Texas, moved to N e w Mexico, and then returned to Texas, where he later endowed these lectures so that we could study and understand the fascinating and instructive history of Texas, the South, and the Greater Southwest i n all its myriad forms. 104

105

106

58

Notes

Preface 1. Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974); see also subsequent editions; and Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). 2. William C. Binkley, "The South and the West,'' Journal of Southern History 17 (1951): 5-22, especially 6, 15.

1. Texas and the California Gold Rush 1. Stephen F. Austin, "Descriptions of Texas, 1828,'' contributed by Eugene C. Barker, Southwestern Historical Quarterly 28 (1924): 98. 2. Stephen F. Austin, "Emigration to Texas from Europe," pamphlet, 1831, quoted in Southwestern Historical Quarterly 28 (1924): 102. 3. Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Founder of Texas (Dallas: Cokesbury Press, 1925), 297. 4. James E. Winston, "New Orleans Newspapers and the Texas Question, 1835-1837," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 36 (1932): 122. 5. William Kennedy, Texas: The Rise, Progress, and Prospects of the Republic of Texas, 2 vols. (London: R. Hastings, 1841). Actually Kennedy expanded on the Texas-California connection in an exchange of public letters to the Times (London), later published as a brochure: Richard Hartnel, comp. Texas and California Correspondence, through the Times, Newspaper of William Kennedy and Nicholas Carter, Esquires, and Richard Hartnel showing the Dangers of Emigrating to Texas, and the superior advantages of the British Colonies (London: Smith, Elder, 1841), 27. 6. Ibid., 27. 7. Ibid., 33.

59

Notes to Pages 2-5 8. Texas expansionist claims are summarized in Billington, Westward Expansion, 491-495. 9. Thomas Falconer, Expedition to Santa Fe: An Account of Its Journey from Texas through Mexico, with Particulars of Its Capture (New Orleans: Lamson, Kendall, Office of the Picayune, 1842); and George Wilkins Kendall, Narrative of the Texan Santa Fe Expedition (New York: Harper and Bros., 1844).

10. Kendall, Santa Fe Expedition, 507-508. The boundary settlement is detailed in Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964), 179-180. 11. See especially, William C. Binkley, The Expansionist Movement in Texas, 1836-1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925). 12. Rodman Paul, California Gold: The Beginnings of Mining in the Far West (New York: Harper and Row, 1947), 16-19. 13. Ralph P. Bieber, ed., Southern Trails to California in 1849 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H . Clark, 1937), 22. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. The California portion of Polk's Annual Message is to be found in House Executive Documents, 30 Cong., 2 sess., no. 1, p. 10. 16. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 26-27. 17. John D. Unruh, Jr., The Plains Across: The Overland Emigrants and the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 120, Table 2. Unruh estimates the central overland emigration at 70,100 total for the years 1849-1851, but never mentions the emigrants on the southem trails. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 43, 51, 62, states that some 9,000 persons used the southern trails in 1849: 3,000 via Fort Smith and Van Buren, Arkansas; 2,500 from Missouri via the Santa Fe Trail; and 3,500 via Texas. Mabelle Eppard Martin, "California Emigrant Roads through Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 28 (1925): 301, asserts that 4,000 emigrants and 1,500 wagons were in El Paso in 1849 alone. It seems likely that some of these were Mexican nationals using the El Paso-Yuma route. 18. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 28. 19. Ibid., 28. 20. Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 287, states that Cooke's account of his wagon road was first published in the New York Courier and Enquirer and copied in the Corpus Christi Star, January 13, 1849. 21. Ibid., 291-292, notes that by mid-January 1849 the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register was devoting one-fourth of its space to California news. A press war also developed between Texas newspapers about the best route through the state. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 29. 22. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 28-62. 23. Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, January 25, 1849, quoted in Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 137-138. 24. Houston Telegraph and Texas Register, February 15, 1849, quoted in Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 142.

60

Notes to Pages 5-8 25. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 32. 26. Ibid., 146. 27. John H . Peoples himself led an overland party that was one of the first Texas groups to reach California. Starting out January 25,1849, they had reached San Diego by June 30. Not far behind were the Kinney Rangers, a party largely made up of migrants from Louisiana and Mississippi. Martin, "California Emigrant Roads,'' 298. 28. John W. Audubon, Audubon's Western Journal, 1849-1850, ed. Frank W. Hodder (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906). The troubles of the Audubon party were also reported in the "Letters and Journals of John E. Durivage," in Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 168. 29. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 32-33. 30. Ibid., 62. Bieber says that 9,000 persons used the southern trails in 1849. On the other hand, Patricia A. Etter, ed., An American Odyssey: The Autobiography of Robert Brownlee (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986), 52, estimates that 18,000 persons crossed the Colorado River going west in 1849. 31. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 33, 224. It is unclear which Texas party arrived in California first. The Peoples party was in San Diego by June 30, 1849. John E. Durivage, a member of another Texas group, reached San Diego on July 2. Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 298. 32. Ferol Egan, The Eldorado Trail: The Story of the Gold Routes across Mexico (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970); Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 291-292.

33. James K. Greer, Colonel Jack Hays: Texas Frontier Leader and California Builder (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1987), 217-226. 34. Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 294, notes that a party led by Captain Hays along the upper route actually preceded the exploring party of Ford and Neighbors. 35. Whiting's "Journal" of his taking the upper road and his return on the more southerly trail, or "lower road," has been reproduced in Ralph P. Bieber and A.B. Bender, eds., Exploring Southwestern Trails, 1846-18S4 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H . Clark, 1938), 243-250. Because forts came to be located on the lower, or military, road and it was deemed safer, the upper road fell into disuse. Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 300. 36. William Turrentine Jackson, Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1869 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 40-41. 37. French is quoted in Jackson, Wagon Roads West, 41. 38. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 41 ; but also Martin, "California Emigrant Roads," 295, notes that "most of the emigrants over the upper route were from central and southeastern Texas, but there is casual mention of many parties from Missouri, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, Tennessee and Indiana." 39. Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies; or, The Journal of a Santa Fe Trader (New York: 1844, and later eds.).

61

Notes to Pages 8-13 40. Grant Foreman, Marcy and the Gold Seekers: The Journal of Captain R. B. Marcy, with an Account of the Gold Rush over the Southern Route (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), 142-143; William H . Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West (New York: Norton, 1978), 273-274. 41. Marcy's enthusiastic endorsement is contained in his journal and is quoted in Foreman, Marcy, 402-403. 42. Robert Beeching, "Journal of Robert Beeching" (MS in Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University). 43. L. N . Weed, "Narrative of a Journey to California in 1849" (MS in Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University). 44. Beeching, "Journal," March 30, 1849. 45. Ibid., undated April,(?), July 13 ff.; entries speak of his Bible and Wesley's hymnal. 46. Ibid., May 29, 1849. 47. Ibid., June io(?), 1849, describes the death of a young man named Fuller who was accidentally killed by his own gun. 48. Ibid., June 11-16, 1849. 49. Ibid., July 13-August 19, 1849. 50. Ibid., September 2, 1849. 51. Ibid., September 4-October 31, 1849. 52. Weed, "Narrative of a Journey to California," 5 - 6 . 53. The statistics for vessels landing in Texas ports can hardly be called accurate, but indirect evidence suggests the round figure of 700. 54. Weed, "Narrative," 10. 55. Ibid., 9. 56. Ibid., 12. 57. Ibid., 16. 58. Ibid., 17-18. 59. Ibid., 18. 60. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas; or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (1857; rpt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978). 61. Weed, "Narrative," 28. 62. Ibid., 29. 63. Ibid., 33. 64. Ibid., 43, 76. 65. Benjamin Butler Harris, The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts and the California Gold Rush, ed. Richard M . Dillon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 83-84. 66. Weed, "Narrative," 84. 67. Ibid., 96. 68. See Introduction to Audubon, Western Journal. 69. George W. B. Evans, Mexican Gold Trail: The Journal of a Forty-Niner, ed. Glenn S. Dumke (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1945). 70. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, 159 n. 149, 164.

62

Notes to Pages 13-21 71. Audubon, Western Journal, 119. 72. Evans, Mexican Gold Trail, 17. 73. Bieber, Southern Trails to California, captures the features of the southernmost routes better than anyone else, while Unruh, The Plains Across, is the fullest description of the central overland experience. 74. Mexican American hospitality recorded by diarists in Santa Fe (for those coming down the Santa Fe Trail), in El Paso, in Tucson, and in Los Angeles, all suggest this. Weed, "Narrative," 37, had a less complimentary explanation, however, saying, "The Mexicans make much of Americans, the men through fear, the women love." 75. Unruh, The Plains Across, 156-200, 395-396. 76. Greer, Colonel Jack Hays, 257ff. 77. "Ben McCulloch," Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 12 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933), 5 - 6 ; "BenMcCulloch," Appleton's Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 4 (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), 97-98. Walter Prescott Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), details the Texas careers of both Hays and McCulloch, but not their careers in California. Thomas Cutrer is currently completing a long-needed biography of Ben McCulloch. 78. "Thomas Jefferson Green," National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 11 (New York: James T. White, 1909), 510-511. 79. Aurora Hunt, "Overland by Boat to California in 1849," The Quarterly: Historical Society of Southern California 31 (1949): 219-229. 80. Donald Jackson, Voyages of the Steamboat "Yellow Stone" (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1985), 97-138. 81. Ibid., 123-134. 82. Ibid., 141-142. 83. "Journal of Stephen F. Austin on His First Trip to Texas, 1821," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 7 (1904): 286-301 see also Barker, Life of Stephen F. Austin, 33. 84. Andreas V. Reichstein, Rise of the Lone Star: The Making of Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1989), 36. 85. Austin's willingness to "cross over" into another culture is a major theme in James E. Crisp, "Anglo-Texan Attitudes toward the Mexicans, 1 8 2 1 1845" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976). 86. Reichstein, Rise of the Lone Star, 36. ;

2. A Breed Apart 1. 2. 3. 4. C. C.

Hartnel, Texas and California Correspondence, 38. Harris, Gila Trail, 6 - 7 . Ibid., 30, 53. Mabelle Eppard Martin, ed., "From Texas to California in 1849, Diary of Cox," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 29 (1925-1926): 36-50, 1 2 8 -

63

Notes to Pages 21-24 146, 203-223, especially 43, records a trick that Harris' train probably would have enjoyed playing. A train ahead of Cox's posted a notice on a tree near the Pecos stating that it had run into 1,500 Comanche, and it being a bad day for fighting, "the whites took only two hundred and fifty scalps." Cox knew it was a Texan yarn, but some of the party became "very vigilant." 5. Harris, Gila Trail, 31. 6. Ibid., 35-36. 7. Ibid., 45-478. Ibid., 55-56. 9. Ibid., 14-17. 10. Ibid., 8 - 1 0 . 11. Nicholas Dawson, Narrative of Nicholas "Cheyenne" Dawson: Overland to California in '41 and '49, and Texas in 'SI, intro. by Charles L. Camp (San Francisco: Grabhom Press, 1933). Another argonaut who went via Dallas and kept a diary was Joseph Pownall. Unfortunately, Robert Glass Cleland, who edited the diary, chose to omit Pownall's account of his trip across Texas. But see Cleland, ed., "From Louisiana to Mariposa," Pacific Historical Review 18 (1949): 2 4 - 3 2 .

12. Dawson, Overland to California, 61. 13. Ibid., 6 4 - 6 5 . 14. Ibid., 66-67. 15. Ibid., 67-70. 16. See Cox's full diary in Martin, "From Texas to California in 1849, Diary of C. C. Cox"; hereafter cited as Cox, "Diary." 17. T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 219, 224, 230-231 P. Briscoe, "The First Texas Railroad," Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 7 (1904): 281. 18. Cox, "Diary," 36. 19. Ibid., 36, 42. 20. Ibid., 38-39. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 39-40. 23. Ibid., 40. 24. Ibid., 45. 25. Ibid., 41-42. 26. Ibid., 132. 27. Ibid., 132-134. 28. Ibid., 210-212. 29. "Lewis Birdsall Harris," The Handbook of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1952), 1, 776. 30. Hunt, "Overland by Boat," 212-219. Based on the Lewis Birdsall Harris Letters in the California State Library at Sacramento, the Hunt article traces the route taken by the Harris family and Cox from Sherman, Texas, to Camp Salvation on the New River in California. 31. Hunt, "Overland by Boat," also notes that Harris' uncle was already ;

64

Notes to Pages 25-28 county clerk at Sacramento when Lewis Birdsall Harris arrived there. After succeeding his uncle as county clerk, Harris then hired his friend Cox to be deputy county clerk! 32. Cox, "Diary," 37. Donald Meinig, Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), 59, refers to Harrisburg as one of Houston's chief rivals. 33. J. Evetts Haley, ed., "James G. Bell, a Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 35 (1932): 209; hereafter cited as Bell, "Log." 34. Ibid., 209. 35. Richard Dallam, "Diary and Journal" (MS in Beinecke Rare Book Library, Yale University). 36. Ibid., December 23, 1852. 37. Ibid., December 31, 1852-March 15, 1853. 38. Ibid., April 24, 25, 30, 1853. John W. Spencer, a Mexican War veteran, was a pioneer mercantile businessman and rancher in the Big Bend country. He maintained a store at Presidio but supplied cattle to the garrison at Fort Davis, sometimes importing Mexican cattle for that purpose. Beginning in the 1880s, Spencer also mined silver in the nearby Chinati Mountains. During the 1880s he enlarged his operation, using the capital of W. S. Noyes of San Francisco. Ronnie C. Tyler, The Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1975), 53, 121-122, 130. 39. Dallam, "Diary and Journal," May 13, 1853. 40. Ibid., May 15-June 24, 1853, passim. 41. Ibid., July 4-September 7, 1853. 42. Ibid., October 1853-March 1854. 43. Ibid. Unfortunately, the entries do not indicate the exact time of arrival at Sacramento in the spring of 1854. 44. Clayton W. Williams, Texas' Last Frontier: Fort Stockton and the TransPecos, 1861-189s (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1982), 95. 45. Ibid., 47, 95, 133, 194. 46. Ibid., 95. See William J. Hammond and Margaret F. Hammond, Le Réunion: A French Settlement in Texas (Dallas: Royal Publishing, 1958); Rudolph E. Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas, 1831-1861 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1930). 47. Bell, "Log," 210, 211 n. 30. 48. Ibid., 227. 49. Ibid., 230, 23In. 50. Ibid., 234. 51. Ibid., 290. 52. Ibid., 294. 53. See Haley's comments in Bell, "Log," 308 n. 34. 54. The final portion of Bell's "Log" is to be found in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly 36 (1932): 4 7 - 6 6 ; see especially 4 8 - 5 8 . See also Robert Glass Cleland, The Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California, 1850-1880

65

Notes to Pages 28-32 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1951), 108-109, where he quotes Joseph G. McCoy as saying, 'This journey of fifteen hundred or two thousand miles was the first really long drive of Texas cattle. Hot winds, dusty trails and hostile Apaches were among the obstacles encountered." 55. Bell, "Log", 63-65. 56. Michael Erskine, The Diary of Michael Erskine: Describing His Cattle Drive from Texas to California . . . , 1854-1859, ed., J. Evetts Haley (Midland, Tex.: Rita Stewart Haley Memorial Library, 1979); see also "Michael Erskine," Handbook of Texas, 1, 570. 57. Harriet Bunyard, "Harriet Bunyard, Diary of a Young Girl, 1869," in Ho for California! Women's Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library, ed. Sandra L. Myres (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1980), 199-254. 58. Ibid., 196, 199n., 200-201, 202. 59. Ibid., 202. 60. Ibid., 204. The Indian threat was still very real and is vividly recounted in Williams, Texas' Last Frontier, 86-247. 61. Bunyard, "Diary," 207. 62. Ibid., 203. 63. Ibid., 205-206. 64. Ibid., 209. 65. Ibid., 210. 66. Ibid., 220. 67. Ibid., 222, 226. 68. Ibid., 218, 230. Donald Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600-1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 35, notes the resumption of the cattle drives from Texas to California after the Civil War. 69. Bunyard, "Diary," 240. 70. Ibid., 251. 71. Ibid. 72. The migrations of black Americans to California during the gold rush is summarized in Rudolph M . Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). A convenient summary of general black migration westward from 1849 to the 1970s is Lapp, "Negroes in the Far West," in Reader's Encyclopedia of the American West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New York: Crowell, 1977), 311-314. 73. Maria Christina Shrode, "Diary of a Journey from Hopkins Co., Texas, to San Diego Co., California, following the Butterfield Overland Mail Route (1870)" (MS in Huntington Library), 18. For purposes of clearer citation, I have used the printed version of the diary as edited by Sandra Myres in her Ho for California! 255-296. Myres has chosen to call Mrs. Shrode's account a journal, and it will be cited as such hereafter. For Shrode's religious feelings, see 260-261.

74. Shrode, "Journal," 263-264; see also Williams, Texas' Last Frontier, which is an excellent history of Fort Stockton. 75. Shrode, "Journal," 264. Members of the train are listed on 295-296.

66

Notes to Pages 32-35 76. Ibid., 269. 77. Ibid., 276-277, 278-279, 280.

78. Ibid., 288, 291. 79. Greer, Colonel Jack Hays, 22, 24-25, 40, 79, 129-130, traces Hays' career as a Texas Ranger. For his encounters with Indians, see 28, 39-53 passim, 9 6 - 9 9 , 105-108, n o , 124-125, 324-325.

80. Ibid., 312-327, details Hays' campaign against the Paiute. 81. Ibid., 286-288. Hays' career as the U.S. surveyor general for California is detailed in chapter 25, 290-311. 82. Ibid., 30off., notes Hays' role in confirming John C. Fremont's claim to the fabulous "ten-million dollar" Las Mariposas grant, but does not provide a critical assessment of Hays as surveyor general. 83. "Ben McCulloch," in Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography, ed. Dan L. Thrapp (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H . Clark, 1988), II, 896; and Greer, Colonel Jack Hays, 58-65, 74-85 passim, 161, 129, 137, 141, trace Hays and McCulloch's association in the Texas Rangers and their connection in the Mexican War. Another Texas Ranger, Captain Isaac G. Messec, served two terms as sheriff of Trinity County, California, and was captain of a company of volunteers in the Klamath Indian War. Harris, Gila Trail, 14-15. 84. "Thomas Jefferson Green," Handbook of Texas, I, 728. 85. Green's remarks are quoted in Ward M . Mcafee, "California History Textbooks and the Coming of the Civil War: The Need for a Broader Perspective of California History," Southern California Quarterly 56 (1974): 164-165. 86. Cleland, Cattle on a Thousand Hills, 85, 143, 154, 166, 174; William F. King, " E l Monte: A n American Town in Southern California, 1851-1866," Southern California Quarterly 53(19711:318-332; also El Monte Young Adult Historical Society, " E l Monte: The End of the Santa Fe Trail" (El Monte: N.p., 1965). However, the most reliable source for El Monte (or "Monte" as it was often called) is Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 18531913 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1926), 90-92. Newmark describes El Monte as "the oldest American settlement in the county, . . . inhabited by a party of mixed emigrants, largely Texans," 91. Newmark also reports that cotton was grown in El Monte, 317. Vigilante action is recorded as well, 324-325, 470-471.

87. Helper is quoted in Mcafee, "California History Textbooks," 166. David S. Terry, yet another former Texas Ranger who came to California in 1849, is described as being accompanied by "twenty or thirty other prominent Texans and a few slaves." Terry became a judge on the state supreme court, but his strong emotions and opinions led him to kill U.S. Senator David C. Broderick in a duel and later to attempt to kill Justice Stephen J. Field. Instead Terry himself was killed by Field's bodyguard. Harris, Gila Trail, 19-20. 88. Paul, California Gold, suggests the open, more democratic nature of placer mining, the ability at self-organization, and the gold's accessibility to many nationalities. See also Rodman Paul Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1960). 89. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 38, writes that "the importance of the simple

67

Notes to Pages 35-41 fact of independence 'has been indelibly stamped on the memory of the Texan . . . and upon the folk memory of the non-Texan as w e l l . " See also Robert Glass Cleland, A History of California: The American Period (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 191. 90. Newmark, Sixty Years, 21, states that William Walker made San Francisco the headquarters for his filibustering expeditions to Lower California. Among others who participated in such expeditions were Alexander Crabbe and Charles D. Poston. 91. Alan P. Bowman, Index to the 1850 Census of the State of California (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1972), 293-321. 92. Ibid., 293-321. 93. C. C. Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy in California," Southern California Quarterly 45 (1963): 223. 94. Hartnel, Texas and California Correspondence, 38. 95. The "go-aheadism" of Texans is a major theme in Mary Lee Spence, "British Impressions of Texas and the Texans," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 70 (1966): 163-183. In Charles Sealsfield's novel about Texas, Das Kajuetenbuch (1844), his character Nathan Strong, the Squatter, has these goahead qualities. 96. Mrs. Houstoun is quoted in Spence, "British Impressions," 175; but see also Mrs. M . C. Houstoun, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico (London, 1844). 97. Sheridan is also quoted in Spence, "British Impressions," 176. 98. Charles Elliott is quoted in Ephraim D. Adams, British Interests and Activities in Texas, 1838-1846 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1910), 127.

3. Imperial Strategies 1. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Knopf, 1982), 123-128, especially 124-125.

2. Lyndon Johnson, "Remarks in Sacramento. . . September 17,1964," Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1963-64 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), II, 1086-1087. 3. Drew Pearson, "Washington Merry Go Round," Washington Post, April 1, 1948, in Papers of Maury Maverick, Sr. (Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin). 4. Minor Moore to Maury Maverick, October 7, 1948, Maverick Papers. 5. Maury Maverick to Honorable Minor Moore, October 14, 1948, Maverick Papers. 6. See Austin, "Descriptions of Texas, 1828," 98-102. 7. Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 8. Houston is quoted in Hietala, Manifest Design, 51. See also Joseph W. Schmitz, Texas Statecraft, 1 8 3 6 - 1 8 4 5 (San Antonio: Naylor, 1941), 194.

68

Notes to Pages 41-44 9. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 18. 10. Binkley, Expansionist Movement, vi. 11. Quoted in ibid., 22-23. 12. Green, quoted in ibid., 23. 13. Ibid., 29; also Cleland, History of California, 143-144. 14. Dorman H. Winfrey, "Mirabeau Lamar and Texas Nationalism," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 59 (1955): 185. 15. Ibid., 186-190, 192-193, 197.

16. Ibid., 197; Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 138, 158, 161; also Binkley, Expansionist Movement, 152, 160, 222. 17. Major William H . Emory quoted in J. Fred Rippy, "Border Troubles along the Rio Grande, 1848-1860," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 23 (1919): 96.

18. Ibid., 9 6 - 9 7 ; Ronnie C. Tyler, "The Callahan Expedition of 1855: Indians or Negroes?" Southwestern Historical Quarterly 70 (1967): 574-585. 19. A n excellent recent history of Texan-Mexican encounters is David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), part I, 13-100. 20. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 281, 291-293. 21. Ibid., 263; Goetzmann notes that the testimony of the government explorers played a role in persuading Congress to approve the Gadsden Purchase. See also Paul N . Garber, The Gadsden Purchase (Gloucester, Mass.: P. Smith, 1959).

22. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 291-292. 23. Howard R. Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), n o ; William H . Goetzmann, Army Exploration of the American West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959)/ 303, 365-368. Jackson, Wagon Roads West, 220-222, discusses efforts to locate springs or to dam streams to provide water. 24. Fort Martin Scott was established December 5, 1848. Handbook of Texas, I, 629. 25. Coon's Rancho, or Fort Bliss, was originally known as the Post of El Paso by Major Jefferson Van Home in February 1848, but it was renamed Fort Bliss in 1854. Handbook of Texas, I, 407, 620-621. 26. Fort Davis was established in the fall of 1854. Handbook of Texas, I, 624. 27. Ibid. 28. Odie B. Faulk, The U.S. Camel Corps: An Army Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 29. Rupert N . Richardson, "Some Details of the Southern Overland Mail," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 29 (1925): 3-18; also O. O. Winther, The Transportation Frontier: Trans-Mississippi West, 186s-1890 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 49-51; but see especially Roscoe P. Conkling and Margaret B. Conkling, The Butterfield Overland Mail, 1859-1869, 3 vols. (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1947). 30. Richardson, "Some Details," 3 - 5 . See also Lately Thomas, Between

69

Notes to Pages 44-48 Two Empires:

The Life Story of California's

First Senator, William

McKendree

Gwin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 166. Gwin chaired the Senate Conference Committee that wrote the final version of the bill that authorized the Butterfield Overland Stage line. 31. Chester V. Kielman, "George W. Giddings and the San Antonio-San Diego Mail Line," Southwestern

32. 33. 34. 35.

Historical

Quarterly

61 (1957): 220-239.

Richardson, "Some Details," ioff. W. L. Ormsby is quoted in Winther, Transportation Frontier, 50. Richardson, "Some Details," 6. John W. Robinson, " A California Copperhead: Henry Hamilton and the

Los Angeles

Star,"

Arizona

and the West 23 (1981): 213-230. For an even

fuller coverage, see Robinson, Los Angeles

in Civil

War Days,

1860-1865

(Los

Angeles: Dawson's Book Shop, 1977). 36. Robert J. Chandler, "Friends in Time of Need: Republicans and Black Civil Rights in California during the Civil War Era," Arizona and the West 24 (1982): 319-340. 37. Cleland, History

of California,

92.

38. Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy," 220-223. Hays' somewhat uncomfortable role as a member of The Chivalry is covered in Greer, Colonel Jack Hays, chap. 27, especially 329-336. 39. Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy," 219-220. 40. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 1 5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 103. 41. Binkley, "The South and the West," 17-18, notes that less than 10 percent of the California population in 1860 had been born in the South, but that three of its senators and five of its representatives were from the southern states. See also Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy," 220. 42. Ibid., 222-223. 43. Starr, Americans

and the California

Dream,

103-104.

44. Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy," 223, estimates that 250 men in southem California joined the Confederacy. 45. Lamar, Far Southwest, 113-114; Charles S. Walker, "Causes of the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico," New Mexico Historical Review 8 (1933); Meinig, Southwest, 35, follows the expansion of Texans into the area between the Rio Grande and the Santa Cruz Valley, but he appears to be talking largely about the post-Civil War period. The transformation of southeastern New Mexico into a new "Little Texas" is a theme pursued by historians and novelists alike. 46. Lamar, Far Southwest, 114 n. 12. 47. The Civil War in New Mexico is treated in William A. Keleher, Turmoil in New Mexico, 1848-1868 (Santa Fe: Rydal Press, 1952). 48. Lamar, Far Southwest, 115-117; see also Martin H. Hall, Sibley's New Mexico Campaign (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960). 49. Lamar, Far Southwest,

119-122.

50. Ibid., 121; also Henry Hopkins Sibley, "Report on the Operation of the Army of New Mexico," in Official

Reports of Batdes

70

(Richmond, 1882), 149.

Notes to Pages 48-51 51. Max L. Heyman, Jr., Prudent Soldier: A Biography of Major General E. R. S. Canhy, 1813-1873 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1959). 52. Lamar, Far Southwest, 121; Aurora Hunt, Major General fames Henry Carleton, 1814-1873 (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1958). 53. Clendenen, " A Confederate Spy/' 222-223. 54. Ibid., 225-229. 55. Ibid., 232. 56. Charles L. Kenner, A History of New Mexican Plains Indian Relations (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969). 57. Ibid., 9-11. 58. Ibid., 15-18, 2 1 - 2 2 .

59. Ibid., 17. 60. Ibid., 55-80. 61. Ibid., 7 8 - 8 9 . 62. Ibid., 8off. 63. Ibid., 8 4 - 8 6 . 64. Ibid., 87. 65. Ibid., 8 8 - 9 3 ; Rupert N . Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur E. Clark, 1933); J. Evetts Haley, Fort Concho and the Texas Frontier (San Angelo, Tex.: San Angelo StandardTimes, 1952). 66. Kenner, New Mexican Plains Indian Relations, chap. 8, especially 164-165.

67. Meinig, Southwest, 26, calls this spread of Hispanics "a little known event of major importance . . . [a] spontaneous unspectacular folk movement." He adds that after the 1870s the Hispanics went as far as Tascosa, Texas, 31. 68. Two classic accounts of the trails north from Texas are Joseph G . McCoy, Historic Sketches of the Cattle Trade of the West and Southwest, ed. Ralph P. Bieber (Glendale, Calif.: Arther H. Clark, 1940); and J. Marvin Hunter, Trail Drivers of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). A recent study is Jimmy M . Skaggs, The Cattle Trailing Industry: Between Supply and Demand, 1866-1890 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973). 69. Books on the American cowboy number in the thousands. A good introduction is Joe B. Frantz and Julian E. Choate, Jr., The American Cowboy: The Myth and the Reality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955). A brief account of the "image" is Howard R. Lamar, "The Cowboys," in Buffalo Bill and the Wild West (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). 70. S. G. Reed, A History of the Texas Railroads (Houston: St. Clair, 1941), io; S. S. McKay, "Texas and the Southern Pacific Railroad, 1848-1860," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 35 (1931): 3. 71. Reed, Texas Railroads, 53; see also P. Briscoe, "The First Texas Railroad," 279-285. 72. Reed, Texas Railroads, 93-97; Jere W. Roberson, "The South and the Pacific Railroad, 1845-1855," Western Historical Quarterly 5 (1974): 1 3 6 186, contains a fine summary of Texas and southern efforts to build a railroad across Texas. At the Memphis commercial convention in 1845, William M .

71

Notes to Pages 51-54 Gwin, future senator from California, and James Gadsden, future negotiator for the Gadsden Purchase, actively promoted a transcontinental route (see especially 164). A second railroad convention held in Memphis in October 1849 proposed to build a railroad from that city to San Diego via El Paso. Thomas Jefferson Green, James Gadsden, and Senators Thomas Rusk and Sam Houston were all busy promoting a southern transcontinental railroad in 1849 (166). And as Roberson notes, during the 1850s, Rusk, Gwin, Houston, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, and Thomas Butler King, a former Georgia senator, all sought congressional authorization of a railroad along the thirty-second parallel (170-172, 175-177).

73. Houston, in turn, was so angry when Robert J. Walker's Atlantic and Pacific Railroad became bankrupt in 1854 that he suggested tar and feathers for Walker, Thomas Butler King, and Thomas Jefferson Green. Houston is quoted in Roberson, "The South and the Pacific Railroad," 180. Even an intersectional effort to secure a transcontinental railroad bill by Rusk of Texas, Gwin of California, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois failed. Texas's role can be followed in McKay, "Texas and the Southern Pacific Railroad," 1-27, especially, 26-27. 74. Meinig, Imperial

Texas, 64, 74.

75. Reed, Texas Railroads,

356ff.

76. David S. Lavender, The Great Persuader 1970); Stuart Daggett, Chapters

on the History

(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, of the Southern

(New

Pacific

York: Ronald Press, 1922); Reed, Texas Railroads, 190-198, 281, 356. 77. Julius Grodinsky, Jay Gould, His Business Career, 1867-1892 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 255, 261-262, 350. 78. Reed, Texas Railroads,

198.

79. Ibid., chap. 55, "What the Railroad Carried." 80. Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic

Promise:

The Populist

Moment

America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 81. J. L. Waller, "The Overland Movement of Cotton, 1866-1886," western

Historical

Quarterly

82. Meinig, Imperial

in

South-

35 (1931): 137-145.

Texas,

79-80.

83. The parallel developments in the California and Texas oil industries are succinctly summarized in Gerald T. White, " O i l Industry," in Lamar, Reader's Encyclopedia

of the American

West, 860-865.

84. Carey McWilliams, North

from Mexico:

The Spanish-speaking

People

of the United States (New York: Greenwood Press, 1948). 85. Terry G . Jordan, " A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas, 1836-1986," Southwestern

Historical

Quarterly

89 (1986): 392.

86. Lawrence B. de Graaf, "The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930," Pacific

Historical

Review

and the Dust

Bowl

39 (1970): 323-352,

especially, 323. 87. Walter J. Stein, California

Migration

(Westport,

Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), 13. Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 57, 216, 261, treats Texas in the Great Depression.

72

Notes to Pages 55-57 88. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, 15; also Seymour J. Janow and Davis McEntire, "Migration to California," Land Policy Review 3 (July-August 1940): 2 5 - 2 6 ; also Seymour J. Janow and William Gilmartin, "Labor and Agricultural Migration to California, 1935-40," Monthly Labor Review 53 (July 1950): 18-53. 89. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, vii. 90. Ibid., vii-viii. 91. Ibid., 8. 92. Ibid., 9. 93. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 115, asserts that Texans who move to California soon lose their identity as a group. James M . Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), on the other hand, argues that an "Okie" folk culture focusing on the Baptist and other fundamentalist Protestant groups and on country music thrive in interior California. In his Preface (xvii), he writes, "Institutions and outlooks imported from the Southwest have taken root; people who were once viewed as despised outsiders now help set community standards. 'We won—we took over/ says one former Oklahoman who has watched the San Joaquin Valley change over the years. 'When I go there . . . I feel I am in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas.'" 94. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, 44. 95. Ibid., 56. 96. Seth S. McKay and Odie B. Faulk, Texas after Spindletop: The Saga of Texas, 1901-1965 (Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1965), 183-185, 209-210, 224, 228. 97. Gregory, American Exodus, xvii, notes that fifteen million people went West between World War I and the start of the sunbelt migration in the 1970s. For population movements into, through, and beyond Texas, see Meinig, Imperial Texas, 110-124, especially Map 16 on 112. 98. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 124. 99. Meinig, Southwest, 109. 100. Niles Hansen, The Border Economy: Regional Development in the Southwest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 165. 101. Calgary is now called the "oil center" of Canada with over 450 oil companies located there. It is still a "western" city of sorts, for it continues to be a major cattle center. Somewhat like Dallas, with which it has many connections, it is a headquarters for financial institutions and engineering firms. See Maxwell and Heather MacEwan Foran, Calgary: Canada's Frontier Metropolis: An Illustrated History (Windsor: Windsor Publications, 1982). Edmonton competes with Calgary as the center of the Canadian oil industry, for its oil wells are located nearby and it has local refineries and access to a major pipeline connection to the United States. See John W. Gilpin, Edmonton, Gateway to the North: An Illustrated History (Woodlawn Hills, Calif.: Windsor Publications, 1984). 102. Don Graham, Cowboys and Cadillacs: How Hollywood Looks at Texas (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1983).

73

Notes to Pages 57-58 103. Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, Empire: Madness

of Howard

Hughes

The Life, Legend, and

(New York: Norton, 1981).

104. See chap. 2 notes 93, 94, 95. 105. C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960). 106. Meinig, Imperial Texas, 118, sees Dallas as an "intermediate point. . . between California and the Southeast, Chicago and Mexico"—"a crossroads in an ever thickening national and international web."

74

Suggestions for Further Reading

General Overviews of Western Expansion Billington, Ray Allen. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Goetzmann, William H . Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West. New York: Norton, 1978. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. Legacy of Conquest New York: Norton, 1987. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Texas and Its Relations to California and the Far West Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele. Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes. New York: Norton, 1981. Barker, Eugene C. The Life of Stephen F. Austin, Founder of Texas. Dallas: Cokesbury Press, 1925. Binkley, William C. The Expansionist Movement in Texas, 1836-18so. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1925. Bieber, Ralph P., ed. Southern Trails to California in 1849. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H . Clark, 1937. Bieber, Ralph P., and A. B. Bender, eds. Exploring Southwestern Trails, 1846-1854. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1938. Bunyard, Harriet. "Harriet Bunyard, Diary of a Young Girl, 1869." in Ho for California: Women's Overland Diaries from the Huntington Library, ed. Sandra L. Myres. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1980. Caro, Robert A. The Years of Lyndon Johnson. New York: Knopf, 1982. Cleland, Robert Glass. A History of California: The American Period. New York: Macmillan, 1922.

75

Suggestions for Further Reading Conkling, Roscoe R, and Margaret B. Conkling. The Butterfield Mail,

Overland

3 vols. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1947.

1859-1869.

Egan, Ferol. The El Dorado

Trail: The Story of the Gold Routes

across

Mexico.

New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Etter, Patricia A., ed. An American

Brownlee.

Odyssey:

The Autobiography

of

Robert

Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

Evans, George W. B. Mexican

Gold

Trail:

The Journal

ed.

of a Forty-Niner,

Glenn A. Dumke. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1945. Fehrenbach, T. R. Lone Star: A History

New York:

of Texas and the Texans.

Macmillan, 1985. Foreman, Grant. Marcy Marcy,

and the Gold

with an Account

Seekers:

of the Gold

The Journal

man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939. Garcia, Mario T. Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. . Mexican

Americans:

of Captain

Rush over the Southern

Leadership,

Ideology,

R. B. Nor-

Route.

of El Paso, and Identity,

1880-1900.

1930-1960.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Graham, Don. Cowboys

and Cadillacs:

Looks at Texas. Aus-

How Hollywood

tin: Texas Monthly Press, 1983. Greer, James K. Colonel

Builder.

Jack Hays,

Texas

Frontier

Leader

and

California

Rev. ed. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1987.

Gregory, James M . American

Exodus:

The Dust Bowl Migration

and Okie

Cul-

New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

ture in California.

Haley, J. Evetts. Fort Concho

and the Texas

San Angelo, Tex.: San

Frontier.

Angelo Standard Times, 1952. Haley, J. Evetts, ed. "James G. Bell, a Log of the Texas-California Cattle Trail, 1854." Southwestern

Historical

Hansen, Niles. The Border

Quarterly

Economy:

35 (1932).

Regional

Development

in the

South-

west. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Harris, Benjamin Butler. The Gila Trail: The Texas Argonauts

nia Gold Rush, Press, i960.

and the

Califor-

ed. Richard M . Dillon. Norman: University of Oklahoma

Hietala, Thomas R. Manifest

Design: Anxious

Agrandizement

in Late

Jackso-

nian America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Hunter, J. Marvin. Trail Drivers of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Jackson, William Turrentine. Wagon Roads Surveys

and Construction

West: A Study

in the Trans-Mississippi

of Federal

Road

West, 1846-1869.

New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Jordan, Terry G. " A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas, 18301986." Southwestern

Historical

Kenner, Charles L. A History

Quarterly

of New Mexican

89 (1986). Plains Indians

man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969. Lamar, Howard R. The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

76

A Territorial

Relations.

Nor-

History.

New

Suggestions for Further Reading Lowitt, Richard. The New Deal and the West. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-

sity Press, 1984. McKay, Seth S., and Odie B. Faulk. Texas after Spindletop:

The Saga of

Texas,

Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1965. Martin, Mabelle Eppard, ed. "From Texas to California in 1849, Diary of C. C. 1901-196$-

Cox."

Southwestern

Historical

Quarterly

29 (1925-1926): 3 6 - 5 0 ,

128-

146, 203-223. Meinig, Donald. Imperial

Texas: An Interpretive

Essay in Cultural

Geogra-

phy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. . Southwest:

Three Peoples

in Geographical

Change,

York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Olmsted, Frederick Law. A Journey through

New

1600-1970.

of Texas,

1836-1986.

Texas; or, A Saddle-Trip

on

the

Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. Reed, S. G . A History of the Texas Railroads. Houston: St. Clair, 1941. Reichstein, Andreas V. Rise of the Lone Star: The Making

College

of Texas.

Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1989. Richardson, Rupert N . The Comanche

Barrier

to South

Plains

Settlement.

Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1933. Shrode, Maria. "Journal." In Ho for California!

from the Huntington

Library,

Women's

Overland

Library, 1980. Spence, Mary Lee. "British Impressions of Texas and the Texans." ern Historical

Quarterly

Southwest-

70 (1966): 163-1893.

Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Oxford University Press, 1973. Stein, Walter J. California

Diaries

ed. Sandra L. Myres. San Marino: Huntington

Dream,

and the Dust

Bowl

18so-191s.

New York:

Westport, Conn.:

Migration.

Greenwood Press, 1973. Tyler, Ronnie C. The Big Bend: A History

of the Last Texas Frontier.

Washing-

ton, D.C.: National Park Service, 1975. Unruh, John D. The Plains Mississippi

West,

Across:

1846-1860.

The Overland

Emigrants

and the

Trans-

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979-

Williams, Clayton W. Texas' Last Frontier:

Fort Stockton

and the

Trans-Pecos,

College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1982. Winfrey, Dorman H . "Mirabeau Lamar and Texas Nationalism." Southwestern 1861-1895.

Historical

Quarterly

59(1955).

77

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Index

Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez, 5 8 Caldwell, Mr., 23 Calgary, 57 California: gold rush in, 3 - 4 / 6 - 7 / 19-37; sentiment for Confederacy in, 44-47, 49 Callahan, James J., 29 Canada, 57 Canby, E. R. S., 47/ 48 Carleton, James E., 46, 48 Caro, Robert A., 39 Cattle: drives, 25-29; ranching,

Abert, J. J., 8 Adams-Oñis Treaty (1819), 1 Apaches, 10 Arizona, 48, 52 Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, 52., 53 Audubon, James, 5, 24 Audubon, John W., 5, 13, 24 Austin, Moses, 16 Austin, Stephen F., 1, 16, 17, 40, 41, 42, 57

Austin, Texas, 11-12, 2 3 - 2 4

34-35

Barnard, G . N., 10-11 Bautista de Anza, Juan, 26, 50 Baylor, John, 46, 48 Beale, Edward F., 3 Bear Flag Revolution, 35 Beeching, Robert, 8-10, 11, 12, 13 Bell, Edward, 27 Bell, James, 27, 28 Benton, Thomas Hart, 43, 47 Bieber, Ralph, 4, 5, 6, 7 Binkley, William C , 2, 41 Blacks, 30-31, 36, 54 Bonner, Dr., 11 Buck and Bryant, 28 Bunnell, Lafayette, 13 Bunyard, Harriet, 20, 29, 30-31 Butterfield Overland, 44

Chandler, Robert J., 45 Civil War, 39, 44~47, 48, 49 Cleland, Robert Glass, 45 Colton, Walter, 3 Comancheros, 4 9 - 5 0 Compromise of 1850, 42 Confederate States of America, 39, 42-43/ 47/ 4 8 - 4 9

Connelly, William, 47 Cooke, Philip St. George, 4, 7, 43 Cowboys, 51 Cox, Cornelius, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25 Crockett, David, 19 Dallam, Richard, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28 Davis, Jefferson, 4 2 - 4 3 , 47 Dawson, Nicholas "Cheyenne," 20,22

79

Index Hays, John Coffey "Jack," 6, 11, 15,

Dunlap and Houston, 28 Durivage, John, 13

20, 3 2 - 3 3 , 34-35

Helper, Hinton Rowan, 34 Hietala, Thomas R., 40-41 Houston, Sam, 16, 35, 41, 42,51, 58

Edmondton, 57 Egan, Ferol, 6 Elliot, Charles, 37 El Monte Boys, 34 El Paso Gas Company, 56-57 Emory, William, 42 Erskine, Michael, 28-29 Evans, George, 13

Houston

Telegraph

and Texas

Reg-

ister, 4

Houstoun, Mrs. M . C , 36 Hughes, Howard, 57 Huntington, Collis P., 52 Indians, 10, 14, 21, 4 9 - 5 0

Fairchild, Franklin and Dean, 28 Faulk, Odie B., 56 Ford, John S., 6, 21 Fremont, John C , 35 French, William Henry, 7

Jackson, Andrew, 41, 42 Jackson, Donald, 16 James, John, 27, 28 Johnson, Lyndon B., 3 9 - 4 0 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 46 Johnston, Joseph E., 7 Jordan, Terry, 38, 54

Gadsden Purchase, 28, 43, 47 Gaillardet, Frederic, 18 Gilpin, William, 47 Glorieta Pass, Battle of, 47 Gould, Jay, 52 Graham, Don, 57 Graham, Major, 43 Green, Thomas Jefferson, 15, 35, 41,

Kearney, Stephen W, 4 Kennedy, H., 4 8 - 4 9 Kennedy, William, 1-2, 19 Kenner, Charles L., 4 9 - 5 0 King, David Starr, 46 Kinney, Henry Lawrence, 5 Kit Carson Association, 11 Knights of the Golden Circle, 46

42

Gregg, Josiah, 7 - 8 Gwin, William McKendree, 34, 42, 44, 45

Lamar, Mirabeau B., 2, 42 Lange, Dorothea, 5 5 Lewis, John, 21 Lincoln, Abraham, 45, 46, 47, 49 Littlefield, George W, and family,

Haley, J. Evetts, 25, 28 Hamilton, Henry, 45 Hancock, Miss, 24 Hansen, Niles, 57 Harazsty, A., and Company, 52 Harney, W S., 7 Harris, Benjamin Butler, 20-21, 22,

20, 39, 58

Loeser, Lucien, 3 Long, Stephen H., 50

23, 24

Marcy, Randolph B., 8 Martin, Mabelle Eppard, 23 Mason, Richard B., 3 Maverick, Maury, 40 McAllister, James, 23 McCoy, Joseph G., 15

Harris, Lewis Birdsall, 15, 20, 23, 24, 25

Harris, Mrs. Lewis B., 23, 24 Hartnel, Richard, 19, 36 Harvey, Colonel, 21 Hastings, Lansford, 48

80

Index Safford, Anson P. K., 52 San Jacinto, Battle of, 16, 23, 33 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 41 Santa Fe Expedition, 42, 57 Scott, Thomas A., 52 Serra, Father Junípero, 26 Settle, Mr., 31 Shakespeare, William, 23 Sheridan, Francis C , 36 Sherman, Sidney, 22-23, 25, 51 Shrode, David Shaw, 31, 32 Shrode, Maria H , 20, 31 Sibley, Henry Hastings, 46, 4 7 - 4 8 Slavery, 13-14 Smith, Henry Nash, 16 Smith, Thomas, 23 Smith, W. F., 6, 7 Southern Pacific Railroad, 52, 53 Stein, Walter J., 55, 56 Steinbeck, John, 54, 55 Stewart (uncle of Harriet Bunyard),

McCulloch, Ben, 15, 20, 34 McKay, Seth S., 56 McNeil, Captain, 12 McWilliams, Carey, 56 Meinig, Donald, 41, 52, 53, 56 Mexicans, travelers and, 10, 13, 14, 28

Mexican War, 14 Mining, in California, 35 Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad (Katy), 53 Mormons, 14, 27 Morris, Minor, 40 Myres, Sandra, 29 Neighbors, Robert S., 2, 6, 9, 21, 22 New

Orleans

Bee, 1

New

Orleans

Daily

New

York Weekly

Norumbega

Picayune, Tribune,

3 4

(boat), 8 - 9 , 10

29-30

Oil, 5 3 - 5 4

Sutter, John Augustus, 3 Sweet, James R., 27

Okies, 54-56 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 12, 14 Oñate, Don Juan de, 50

Taylor, Paul S., 56 Taylor, Zachary, 33 Texan-Santa Fe Expedition, 2 Texas: and gold rush to California, 1-17; imperial strategies of, 39-58; role of citizens in gold rush, 19-37 Texas and Pacific Railroad, 5 2 Texas Railroad, Navigation, and Banking Co., 41 Thorne, Herman, 10 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo

Paul, Rodman, 35 Pearson, Drew, 40 Pease, Elisha M., 51 Pennsylvania Railroad, 52 Peoples, John H., 5 Percifor F. Smith Association, 8 Pierce, Franklin, 33 Poinsett, Joel R., 1, 38 Polk, James K., 3 Pueblo-Plains Indians, 4 9 - 5 0 Railroads, 25, 43, 51 — 53 Randolph, John, 10 Reichstein, Andreas, 16 Richardson, Rupert N , 44, 50 Robb, John, 13 Runnels, Hardin Richard, 51-52 Rusk, Thomas Jefferson, 42, 44

(1848), 2

Treaty of Velasco (1836), 2 Turner, T. J., 25 Twiggs, D. E., 46 Union Pacific Railroad, 52 United States, army, 43

81

Index Wharton, William, 41 Whiting, W H . C , 6, 9 Williams, Clayton W, 27 Winfrey, H., 42 Woll, General Adrian, 27 Woodward, C. Vann, 58 World War II, impact of, 56 Worth, William J., 5, 6, 7 Wright, Lyman, 12

United States-Mexican Boundary Commission, 42 United States Topographical Engineers, 14-15 Van Horn, Jefferson, 7, 8 Valverde, Battle of, 47 Wayland, Miss, 24 Weed, L. N., 8, 10-11, 12, 13, 32 Weiler, John B., 45

Y e l l o w S t o n e (boat), 15-16

82