The History of the Old American West – 4 Books in One Volume (Illustrated Edition). Emerson Hough
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solid land. The hands of the waterless bogs hold them down. For a day the creature holds its head clear of the mud. Then its head sinks down. Lucky is it if there be water enough to make the mud soft, so that it soon covers the nostrils and cuts off the toiling breath. Above these traps of death clouds of buzzards are always soaring. Others drape the dismal live oaks in lines of sombre black, blending fitly with the sombre gray of the hanging moss. Along the banks of such dried water holes there are always lying hundreds of skeletons. The loss of life is unknown and uncounted. Horses, cows, calves, all the animals of the range perish here yearly in unestimated numbers. The loss of wealth is frightful in the aggregate, yet it is one of the ways of the cattle trade never to regard it and to take no means of preventing it. Indeed, nothing can be done to prevent it. It is the way of Nature. The rancher of the southern range will say to you that you shall have as your own property every horse you shall pull out of the mud, every horned head that you shall save from death in the depth of the waterless bogs. But though you take pony and rope and drag out helpless victim after victim, what then shall you do? They die upon the banks because they can not travel to other water, if indeed there be any other water within many miles. The tragedy goes on year after year, to what extent no one knows. The rancher comes to be entirely careless of it. The business of cattle ranching is primarily but a rude overlapping of the ways of Nature, and to Nature's care and protection are left the creatures whose lives are only partially taken in charge by their human owners.
These untrodden wildernesses of the coast range are now, strange to say, threaded by long lines of wire fence. A "pasture" is an inclosed tract of land perhaps forty or fifty miles square. In the long wire boundary fence there may not be a gate for twenty miles. The hunter who is lost there feels fortunate if he finds one of these long fences. Yet many a hunter, and many a new man on the range has found such a fence and followed it until he fell, mad with a thirst which he found no way of appeasing. The gray oaks and the evil cacti and the curled mesquite smile bitterly to-day over many such unfound wanderers. The native cowboys and range men know where the trail goes, where the gates are, where the ranch house is — far back, let us suppose, on the high prairie, where the windmills furnish sweet water in an unfailing supply. This house may be built of boards, simply and modestly, and it possibly is left unpainted. The house itself is a long and low one, with but a single story, and constructed with a wide hall extending through, so that the wind may blow in with what coolness it can claim in the torrid summer days. The rooms are large and airy, and the furniture is comfortable. There are green trees about this house, cottonwoods that have grown up tall and thin at the edge of the slender streams of water wasted from the windmill, and some audacious hand has actually planted flowers about a small plat of precious green. Apart from the house of the owner, which is at times occupied by himself and family, there is another and larger building of ruder furnishing. Here we find an interior not widely different from that of the ranch in the Indian Nations. We may find here, too, perhaps, a foreman whose only name is Jim. He has been foreman on the Star D for many years.
This country of the Texas coast is very hot, except in winter when the "northers" come, which chill the blood so strangely and which often kill hundreds of the weaker cattle with their mysterious, penetrating cold. Snow is never known here, and of winter as it is understood in the North there is practically none. The rainfall during the summer is extremely scant. All about the ranch house, miles and miles, as far as the eye can reach, the surface of the earth is gray and cheerless, with few trees inside the range of the low coast timber or chaparral. The hot sun in summer sets all the surface of the earth a-tremble, so that it moves and heaves and writhes. On the horizon float the strange pictures of the mirage. All men know there is no water where the mirage beckons. The water, rare, small, precious, is here, a jewel in this circle of green, this oasis in the apparent desert of the range.
Such is another ranch of the South. But with description so partial and imperfect we shall not even yet have covered our text sufficiently well to entitle us to leave it. We shall have left untouched and unindicated a vast territory of the Southern range where the cattle industry flourished for generations before it was dreamed of in the North. Suppose we move yet some hundreds of miles into the far Southwest, coming to that long arm of Spanish civilization which projects up from Mexico into the United States, last and lax hold upon a region which once bore the flag of Spain. Here, if anywhere to-day upon the cattle range, the ways of the past prevail, and here we shall find an environment as odd and picturesque as any. The Pecos and the Rio Grande rivers bound a vast and ill-known region, which has mountains and plains untraversed by the foot of the American tourist. Here we shall find villages unmarked on any map. We shall find men who in all their lives have never seen a railroad train nor heard the sound of the church-going bell. Life here, beyond that of any section of the United States, is ancient, simple, unprogressive, and truly pastoral in its features. In this far-away corner of the land the ways of modern life are slow to penetrate. The impact of Anglo-Saxon civilization is taken up by the vis inertias of the old Spanish ways. The vigorous Northerner becomes in a few years a slow-spoken and deliberate New Mexican. The cloudless blue sky, the soft warm air, the unvarying equanimity of Nature will have none of haste or worry. The country makes all men its own. It softens and blends and harmonizes all things and all men into its own indifferent calm.
The tone of our landscape here is not light, but deep in tint, a rich red brown which shades off into the plains and back into the darker colours of the mountains. You would call absolutely barren these wide tracts of land which lie shimmering and throbbing in the unscreened sun. The soil appears to be worthless sand or coarse baked earth. As you look out over such a country you can not believe it possible that it would support any animate life, unless it were this lizard upon the rock, or this hideous horned toad which crawls away from under foot, or these noisy prairie dogs which yelp here as they do upon the northern range. Yet this soil carries the rich gramma grass, whose little scattered tufts, not so large or so gray as those of the buffalo grass, cure and curl down upon the ground and form a range food of wondrous fattening quality.
We are in a mountain country here. The tablelands on which the cattle graze are more than four thousand feet above the level of the sea. The smaller table-lands or mesas are still more lofty. The foothills run up above six thousand feet, and back of these are mountains, sometimes low and brown, sometimes black with the heavy growth of pifions, sometimes high enough to have white tops for many months in winter. Snow never falls at this latitude over the lower valleys and mesas. Hay is rarely seen, except as imported in bales. The native Mexican sometimes makes a faint effort to cut a little hay, but does his mowing with a clumsy hoe. His grainfields are but little patches, and the reaping is done altogether with a sickle. In every way this is an ancient and pastoral land.
We are far down in the lower end of the great Rocky range, and at a point where little detached ranges and spurs run out from the main chain and make small mountain systems, each with a Spanish name of its own. We hear of the San Miguels, the Oscuras, the Sacra-mentos, the Magdalenas, the Capitans, the Nogales, the Bonitos, the Blancos, the Patos, the Carrizos. Out of each of these little subranges runs some one or more mountain streams, each stream called a rio, or river, no matter how small it may be. This high table-land is a waterless country. It may be that only one or two scant water holes are known in a space of a hundred or two hundred miles. A tiny well is a treasure. A rio is a fortune. In this region of rainless skies water is the one priceless thing.
The small river tumbles swiftly down out of the mountains, as any mountain stream, and it bears the mountain trout as do the waters of the upper ranges; yet after it has emerged from the mountains and passed through the foothills its course is very brief. In a few miles, perhaps twenty, forty, or fifty miles, it sinks and is lost forever in the sands of the plains. Many miles beyond there may be another river arising from the sand and struggling on a little way in the attempt to reach the Pecos or the Rio Grande. Without doubt these waters are connected with the great sheet of water which underlies all that region, and which will sometime be brought up by man to make this desert blossom. What there may be beneath the surface of the earth, however, does not concern our Mexican ranchero. It is enough for him that his father and his father's father held the land and owned the cattle. Bills of sale recording the curious old Spanish brands have been in his family for a long time.
This is an old cattle country. Countless rodeos have crossed these hills. Innumerable branding irons have been heated in the piñon fires of these corrals. None