to. They were the cutting edge of a people whetted sharp to go places, to wear things out and move on, to take over and to use and to discard. It is doubtful that any of the people in history whetted in that way, from Alexander to a Russian lieutenant-colonel of tanks in Budapest, have wanted to dwell much in their minds on the humanity of the people in their path, on abstract justice. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to go where they went. You do not, for instance, conquer an Aztec empire with 400 men and a set of developed humanistic impulses.
Drunken, shiftless Choctaw Tom was no Aztec, but he shared with them a fate. His Hernán Cortez was a man named Peter Garland—Captain Garland, they called him; the frontier seems to have bred titular soldiers like maggots. He lived forty or fifty miles south of the Reserve, but he had been losing stock to Indians, and one day in 1858 he gathered up a crowd of bravos with similar grievances, or maybe justwith a wish for friction, and headed for the Palo Pinto country with blood in his eye.
Choctaw Tom’s motley little party had left the Reserve to graze their stock, with army permission. He had no reason to think of trouble; he was known and liked and joked at by the white men of that neighborhood.
“Hey, Tom!” maybe a young one would shout at him along the road. “Gotty purty gal? Wanty whisky?”
“Whisky, yes, God damn,” he’d yell back, the old black eyes with their yellow whites sparkling. “No gal. Pony?”
A clot of his own people followed him around usually; he had status among them. With some other old men and some women and children he was encamped at the Indian Hole, unluckily accessible, when Garland reached the area. Maybe what Garland did shows a sense of abstract justice after all. Of abstraction, anyhow. Certainly it had no concrete connection with Choctaw Tom’s outfit. Garland and his volunteers hit them at dawn while they slept, loping through the lane between the lodges and shooting right and left, turning and loping back through.… When they rode out, presumably well satisfied (“Indians” had stolen stock; “Indians” had been dealt with), seven men and women and children were dead and the rest pretty thoroughly shot up.
Afterward, in Palo Pinto town, the captain with pride told someone: “We have opened the ball, and others can dance to the music.”
Others did, though Garland was probably overestimating his own role in history. It is unlikely that his little ugliness lighted the fuse to the main powder keg, because the main powder keg was labeled “Comanche,” and he hadn’t ventured to touch them. But he set a pattern for other settlers like him, and it seems that more were like him than werelike, say, Robert Neighbors. Many more … In Jacksboro some blood howlers started a newspaper,
The Whiteman
, dedicated to those propositions implied by its name. And The People themselves were getting restive, resentful of the white encroachment on so much good land and grass and water, covetous of the big, fast, American riding stock. That was the year they massacred the Cambren and Mason families in Jack County just to the north, the first real bloodiness of its kind in the area. Companies of white Rangers, official and otherwise, were organized and began vengefully to track war parties and stolen stock across the wild prairies.
Things were shaping up. Old Sam Houston the Raven, ally of all Indians by tepee marriage and temperament, hurled objections from the southern seat of government but got nowhere. “I agreed,” Austrian George Erath wrote in his memoirs—he knew the Brazos country—
I agreed, but I said that no man would dare tell them so unless he wanted to be hanged, and that if he, Houston, went up there preaching peace they would hang him.
Houston was the one who sadly, somewhere along the line, said there was no solution. He said that if he could build a wall across Texas which would keep all the
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