Ten miles out of Ardmore, on the Oklahoma-Texas border, an old man at the window said, 'Gene Autry.'
But asking him for an explanation I missed the place, which was not the cowboy but another town and a railway station so small the Lone Star bowled through it without slowing down.
'Maybe he was born there,' said the man. 'Or maybe buried.'
Low dry hills giving on to grey-green plains marked the Texas border. No ice, no snow; the weather looked mild. Followed by blackbirds, a farmer ploughed a field in a tractor, screwing six stripes out of the ground as he went. I was relieved to see that he was not wearing mittens. So the season had changed; it was early spring here in the first week of February, and if I kept to the trains it would be summer for me in a few days. The air traveler can be jetted to any climate at short notice, but the railway passenger on the southbound express has the satisfaction of seeing the weather change hour by hour and watching for its minutest alteration. At Gainesville there was planting, and more ploughing, and some inch-high shoots. There were trees around the houses here and less constriction than I had seen in the Oklahoma settlements. These were homesteads, with wells and wind-vanes and what might have been orchards.
Here, where the red man swept the leaves away
To dig for cordial bark or cooling root,
The wayside apple drops its surly fruit.
The direction of the Lone Star — compare it with any history book map — is the direction of the main cattle drive north, the Chisholm Trail. At first, in the 1860's, the cattle were driven through what was known as the Indian Territory in Oklahoma, to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. All the great railroad towns — Dodge City, Wichita (which we had passed at 6am), Cheyenne — flourished because of the cattle that were penned and graded there before being loaded on the Chicago-bound trains. Some of the cattle on the long drive from the Rio Grande were wild, but all were dealt with Mexican-style — the American cowboys had inherited the lariat and the branding iron and most of the lingo, including the word lingo, from Mexican cattlemen. The Chisholm Trail was only one of the routes; the Sedalia took cattle through Arkansas and Missouri, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail ran along the Pecos River. The railways took over these routes — the water supplies along the way, which had determined the course of the Chisholm Trail, were no less important to the steam locomotives' thirst — and only much later did passengers replace cattle as a source of railway income.
I saw herds of cattle, and ducks in flight, and large black circling birds that might have been buzzards, but even here- nearly a thousand miles south of Chicago — the trees were bare. I had not seen one green tree in four days of cross-country travel. I watched for one, but only saw more birds of prey, or windmill pumps, or horses cropping grass. There were houses here, but no towns of any description; what trees I saw were dead but still upright like rather wicked coat-racks along dry creekbeds. Behind the isolated and rusty-roofed farmhouses there was empty space, and nearer the track and usually beside a fence of thorny barbed wire, I saw what I expected to see, the staves of cattle bones, the bleached knuckles and heaps of vertebrae, the cracked and hollow-eyed skulls.
Texas pride, an amiable but tenacious vulgarity, was the grotesquely fat man wearing his ten-gallon hat in the Silver Dollar Saloon in downtown Fort Worth, in February. It might have been a gesture of defiance — the day was overcast and chilly, the bar dungeon-dark (its only light the subaqueous flicker from a fish tank bubbling on a shelf of whisky bottles). I had ducked in here to get warm and quietly read The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Once my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I sat near the fish tank to read. I also had a decision to make: I could spend the night in Fort Worth, or leave in a matter of hours for Laredo. But I had left my suitcase at the railway station. I had not liked the look of Fort Worth.
It had been recommended to me as friendlier and more graspable than Dallas, and yet that February afternoon it looked merely gray and grit-blown, a Texas town of pompous insignificance, the desert wind whirling gory ketchup-soaked sandwich wrappers at men clutching their ridiculous hats. Every public place displayed the same ominous sign (or rather two signs — I'm not counting You Don't Have to Be Crazy to Work Here — But It Helpsl). The warning went as follows:
These premises may be occupied by a policeman armed with a shotgun. If ordered to halt — please comply!
— Fort Worth Police Dept.
It was perhaps a comment on Fort Worth friendliness that the citizens needed to be reminded that a man with a shotgun meant business, and was not the clay-pigeon enthusiast he seemed.
That sign was in all the finance companies, and in the stores selling Western gear — Fort Worth had more than its share of these two enterprises: you could get a mortgage and a gold lamé cowboy suit on every corner. It was also in the Blood Donor Center ($50 a pint, and two scruffy individuals waiting to have their veins opened) and the narrow office of the bail bondsman (24-Hour Service said the sign, which also showed a poor devil in handcuffs) and all the chili parlours. It was in the Silver Dollar, too, but by the time I had taken refuge there I had seen it so often it had lost its power to intimidate me.
In the gurgling light of the fish tank I read the newspaper. The headlines were indignant over local issues. I skipped to the sports page; here, the lead story was an exultant blow-by-blow account of the Southwest Exposition and Fat Stock Show Rodeo. No baseball, no football, no hockey — only the American equivalent of bear-baiting. A rodeo — this was sports? The report covered the entire page, and the next page as well ('Bull Riding', 'Calf Roping'). These people were serious.
'Not too awful long ago,' said the fat man in the ten gallon hat, using a construction that was new to me, and making it sound — by saying it slowly — like a complete sentence, 'folks here would have started a revolution if they couldn't read the rodeo scores. Sure, we're glad to have it.'
But rodeo news was little more than a balance sheet listing the winnings of the cowpoke pictured tormenting a bull. I found it a mystifying triumph, and the amassing of two thousand dollars — there was no mention of technique — an ungainly, if not unworthy, victory. Aside from the barbarity of it, this was the first sports page I had ever seen where there were dollar signs beside every score.
Hoping for a little light relief I turned to the Letters to the Editor. After all, if I was going to spend the night here it would help if I had some clue to the city's character. The first letter began, 'It is generally known that the theory of evolution is being taught in the public schools as a fact. .' There followed some rather clumsy sarcasm about science eroding 'moral values', and every indication that a Scopes-like Monkey Trial might follow the Fat Stock Show as Fort Worth's next attraction. Letter Two: Hold on to the Panama Canal, for Christ's sake! Letter Three was an extraordinary denunciation of the Texas Democratic Committee for inviting Cesar Chavez to Texas. It implied that Mr Chavez was a troublemaker for wanting to organize farm labourers. This letter ended, 'Unions are doing more to destroy our national economy, promoting unemployment and inflation than any one cause.'