"Northers"—Almost frozen—The Mexican Indian—Cold-blooded
Ingratitude—Mexican untrustworthiness.
The chief drawback to the fine Texas climate is the “Norther” or cold
north wind, that is really sometimes pretty bad. You can hear the wind
roar for minutes before it reaches you, and when it strikes the
temperature goes down and down. I heard a norther coming once about four
o’clock in the afternoon, and ran out to the porch to look at the
thermometer. It stood at 106° F., and within fifteen minutes it was 70°
F. and still dropping, and by morning it was freezing. These northers
seldom last over three days at a time, and they are generally followed
by beautiful weather. There are about a dozen or so of them in a winter,
but unless accompanied by rain they are not so bad as one might think. I
was fishing on the Nueces river one Saturday night about ten o’clock for
cat-fish, when I was surprised by a wet norther. I crawled with my
saddle, &c., under a shelving rock and waited for the rain and hail to
let up a bit. After a while I noticed that the river was rising, and as
I happened to be on the wrong side from home, and the river sometimes
stays up for three or four days, I had perforce to saddle up and get
across while I could. When I got to the other side I could find no
shelter, and as I had a good mess of fish I thought I might as well
strike out for home. I did not feel the full force of the wind till I
got out of the bottoms, but it was bitter when I reached the hills. I
was so nearly frozen when I got home, about 2 A.M., that I could not
unsaddle my horse till I had gone into the house, got a hot whisky, and
warmed up.
On another occasion I was deer-hunting with a friend. We drove out in
the evening in my buggy and pitched camp on a little rise where there
was dry firewood, and after cooking supper we rolled up in our blankets
and went to sleep. In the night a dry norther came up, and it was one of
the worst I ever saw. Each pretended to be asleep so that the other
should light a fire, but at last we could stand it no longer, so we both
got up and built a fire. The only way we could keep from freezing was to
pull the buggy up to the windward side of the fire and make a wind-brake
of some of our blankets tied to the wheels, so that we could sit between
this and the fire. But the windbreak also acted as a chimney and sucked
the smoke into our faces. When day broke we had to give up the idea of
hunting. Our faces were the colour of a well-smoked ham, and our eyes so
bloodshot that we could not see a deer at fifty yards. But curiously
enough, one never seems to be the worse for being caught in one of these
storms, and one seldom takes cold.
The average Mexican Indian is a peculiar man, and one rarely can tell
what his real feelings are. They are not dependable; a man may be your
friend for years and then for some slight cause or supposed insult may
turn and kill you. The only real personal trouble I had at the mines
came about in this way. There were two young fellows who had started
with us as water-boys, and finding them intelligent I had finally raised
them to drillers, and given them each charge of an Ingersoll drill.
Their father was a hand-driller, and also owned a couple of wagons doing
freighting for us. The family considered themselves under obligations to
me, and I thought I could depend on them. One day the old man came to me
(accompanied by his two boys) and said the timekeeper had made some
mistake in his time, and asked me to have it rectified. Instead of
sending for the timekeeper I thought I would straighten up the matter
personally, as I was not very busy at the moment, and I took them into
the office. While I and the old man were going over the time slips and
wagon reports, the younger boy kept interrupting and putting in remarks,
till he aggravated me into telling him sharply to shut up. He answered
me in an insolent manner that he had come to see his father get justice
and intended to do so. His father and brother tried to shut him up, and
I told him that if he spoke to me like that again I would throw him out.
“You will, will you?” he said, jerked out his knife, and came for me. As
I reached for my gun his brother took a flying leap on to his back, and
down they came at my feet struggling for the knife, which finally the
elder brother took from him. When they got up I told the young man he
was discharged, and would have to leave the company’s property at once.
The father and elder brother begged me to let him off this time. But I
said to them, “You know that Manuel now has a grudge against me. I have
a lot of night walking to do. Life is too short for me to have to live
in fear of, or have to pull a gun on, every man who walks up behind me
in the dark, so when the nervous strain reaches a certain pitch I shall
either kill Manuel or he will kill me. Is it not so?” The brother and
father had to agree that I was right, and I never saw Manuel again. It
was a case of a mountain out of a molehill, but I could not afford to
take chances, and now, after sixteen years’ experience of Mexican ways,
I am still convinced that I did the only thing that I could do under the
circumstances.
A case of really cold-blooded ingratitude happened near Uvalde to a
young fellow that I knew. There was an elderly American couple with one
son, who had adopted a Mexican boy, bringing him up as a member of the
family. The old man died when the boys were about nineteen years of age,
leaving all he had to his wife. They had a small ranch on which they
raised goats, besides having a few stands of bees. A short while after
the father’s death they decided to sell out their Uvalde ranch and move
to Devil’s River in North-west Texas, where they could get a larger
ranch for their increasing flocks. They sold the ranch and were to move
the next day by camp wagon, driving the goats, and taking the money
(about $800) with them. The party was to consist of the mother, the son
John, the Mexican boy Juan, and an old Mexican goat-herd who had worked
for the family for years. The day before they were to start John went
into town to get some supplies and the money, but before leaving the
ranch he asked Juan if there was anything he could bring him out from
town. Juan said he wanted a good bowie knife. When John, on his return,
drove up to the house he handed the sheath-knife to Juan, whom he met
out at the corral, and then carried the money and the things he had
bought into the house. Amongst the things was a new rifle which he had
bought at the last moment, and which he now loaded and put up on two
nails over the lintel of the door: this act saved his life. For while he
was inside, Juan went to the old goat-herd with the proposition that
they two should go in and kill the two Americans, take the money, wagon,
goats, and pull out for the border. “Every one will think they are gone,
and there will be no hunt for them till we are safe,” he said. At first
the old herder thought it was all a grim joke, but when he saw it was
really meant in earnest, he started for the house to warn them. The
younger man was too quick for him, however, and stabbed him twice in the
back before he could reach the door of the house. His cry brought John
to the door, where he was met by a stab in the chest from the Mexican,
who reached there at the same time. John fell in the doorway, and Juan
jumped over him and made for his adoptive mother. She, however, had seen
John stabbed, and, being an old frontier woman, was quick to act and
full of fight. As Juan came for her she grabbed an old shot-gun from its
hooks on the wall, which he also had to seize with both hands to keep
its muzzle pointing away from him, and so could not make use of his
knife. The old woman was strong, and the fight was desperate for
possession of the old gun.
The grim joke of the thing, if joke there can be in such a tragedy, was
that neither of them knew that the gun was unloaded and useless.
Meanwhile John had managed to get to his feet and reach down his
Winchester, then, dropping again to the floor from weakness, he was
ready for action. “Turn him loose, mother,” he called, and the old lady
without question turned Juan and the gun loose and got out of the line
of fire. As soon as Juan saw that the tables were turned, and that John,
instead of being helpless as he had thought, was armed, he dropped on
his knees and prayed for his life. But all the answer he got was ten
shots from the Winchester; John believed in making a good job of it. The
old lady went out, caught one of the horses, and rode into town for the
doctor and the sheriff. The old herder only just lived long enough to
tell his tale, but John recovered. As for Juan, I think he was lucky in
receiving death from the Winchester, instead of at the hands of the
Uvalde citizens when they heard of the tragedy.
I have lived nearly seventeen years in daily contact with Mexicans, and
I can truthfully say that there is not one of them that I know of (of
the lower or working classes) with whom I would go into the hills alone
with $500 in my possession, if the Mexican knew I had it and thought he
could get away with it after disposing of me. Yet I like them as
workmen, and get along very well with them. So I do not utterly condemn
them, nor would I go as far as the clergyman who made a tour of Mexico.
He was a very literal and truthful man, and on his return to the States
he was asked what he thought of the Mexicans. “Is it true,” he was
asked, “that all the women are immoral and all the men liars and
thieves?” “Well,” said he, “I would hardly go as far as that, because,
you see, I did not meet all of them!”
It must be remembered that the Mexican lower classes are Indians, either
pure or with slight European admixture. Naturally they retain the moral
code of their nation, by which the first duty is revenge for injury,
however small. Ingratitude and greed are defects, perhaps, by that code,
but too common to be reckoned as vices. When “wild in woods the noble
savage ran,” he seems from contemporary accounts to have been much like
the Pathans of India’s border.