Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) by John Graves Page B
Authors: John Graves
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Indians securely to the west, the God-damned Texans would crawl over it from their side.… He was right. The Brazos whites finally organized a full-scale attack on the Lower Reserve, the peaceful Indians. Because of the firmness of the army commander there, and the unexpected backbone of the Indians themselves, it came to nothing; but in 1859 Robert Neighbors had to lead an official removal of all Indians from Texas, farmers and fighters alike, up across the Red andinto the Territory. After he had them there, he sent Washington a bitter message:
I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.
When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman’s brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later.…
The heterogeneous little collection of farming tribes stayed in the Territory, those who survived their new proximity to The People—and many did not survive it. Their racial will to endure seems to have ebbed; disease ate at them, and their women munched abortifacient weeds to avoid letting the long-continued nonsense go any further.
The Comanches and the Kiowas, on the other hand, simply had a new base from which to continue that fighting their ethos impelled them to. From that time onward, it was illegal for them even to hunt buffalo in Texas. But the old gap between law and enforcement was wider than usual in the wild western country. They ran as they had always run, and had a good clear focus for hatred now—the frontier’s téjanos—and for another fifteen years or so, helped by theconfusion of the War and Reconstruction, they raked that frontier and, indeed, practically froze it on one line for a good while.
A LL SUCH ANTIQUE VIOLENCE , though, seemed to have less than it might to do with a drifting, sparkling, sunlit afternoon between the mountains, and the solid feeling that we deserved it, the passenger and I.… Little Keechi, the Harris Bend, and down the slick fast water into Post Oak where redbirds sang from both shores and big rocks glided past beneath the keel, the ones the little man at Possum Kingdom had warned me of …
The Brazos belonged to me that afternoon, all of it. It really did. The autumn-blue sky (fair skies in Texas at other times of year tend to be white, bleached), the yellow-white air, the cedars and oaks green and gold and red, the rocks the size of buildings, the sun on my back, the steady, comfortable stroke of the paddling, mohair goats kowf!-ing at me from the shore when they caught my scent … Belonged to me and the whistling birds and the unseen animals (deer and coon tracks overlaid each other in the shore’s silt) and to the big suckers that leaped and splashed … People’s sounds and a consciousness of them touched me from time to time—an ax’s chock up in the cedar, a cow call, a tractor sputtering in the flatland of a bend, a jet’s scar across the high blue and its blowtorch blare and the crack of its sudden liberation from its own sound—but it was fall, and they weren’t on the river. It was mine.
Savoring its possession, I ran too late in the bright evening and had to camp hastily among sandburs on a Bermuda-grass flat. They stuck to so many parts of the passenger thathe went into the tent and sulked, picking them off onto our bedding.
Bacon for supper, and lumpy biscuit bread baked by the fire … It occurred
I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.
When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman’s brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later.…
The heterogeneous little collection of farming tribes stayed in the Territory, those who survived their new proximity to The People—and many did not survive it. Their racial will to endure seems to have ebbed; disease ate at them, and their women munched abortifacient weeds to avoid letting the long-continued nonsense go any further.
The Comanches and the Kiowas, on the other hand, simply had a new base from which to continue that fighting their ethos impelled them to. From that time onward, it was illegal for them even to hunt buffalo in Texas. But the old gap between law and enforcement was wider than usual in the wild western country. They ran as they had always run, and had a good clear focus for hatred now—the frontier’s téjanos—and for another fifteen years or so, helped by theconfusion of the War and Reconstruction, they raked that frontier and, indeed, practically froze it on one line for a good while.
A LL SUCH ANTIQUE VIOLENCE , though, seemed to have less than it might to do with a drifting, sparkling, sunlit afternoon between the mountains, and the solid feeling that we deserved it, the passenger and I.… Little Keechi, the Harris Bend, and down the slick fast water into Post Oak where redbirds sang from both shores and big rocks glided past beneath the keel, the ones the little man at Possum Kingdom had warned me of …
The Brazos belonged to me that afternoon, all of it. It really did. The autumn-blue sky (fair skies in Texas at other times of year tend to be white, bleached), the yellow-white air, the cedars and oaks green and gold and red, the rocks the size of buildings, the sun on my back, the steady, comfortable stroke of the paddling, mohair goats kowf!-ing at me from the shore when they caught my scent … Belonged to me and the whistling birds and the unseen animals (deer and coon tracks overlaid each other in the shore’s silt) and to the big suckers that leaped and splashed … People’s sounds and a consciousness of them touched me from time to time—an ax’s chock up in the cedar, a cow call, a tractor sputtering in the flatland of a bend, a jet’s scar across the high blue and its blowtorch blare and the crack of its sudden liberation from its own sound—but it was fall, and they weren’t on the river. It was mine.
Savoring its possession, I ran too late in the bright evening and had to camp hastily among sandburs on a Bermuda-grass flat. They stuck to so many parts of the passenger thathe went into the tent and sulked, picking them off onto our bedding.
Bacon for supper, and lumpy biscuit bread baked by the fire … It occurred
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