In Texas: the Uses of Yesterday

By LANCE MORROW

The post hospital burned down long ago. So did Officers' Quarters No. 5. But the 21 remaining limestone buildings at Fort Concho--the enlisted men's barracks, the two-story headquarters that dominates the parade ground, the officers' row--all glint beige-red in the West Texas sunset as they did 100 years ago.

Complicated historical ghosts inhabit the place. In the 1870s the fort was the headquarters for the U.S. Army's District of the Pecos. Across this territory over the centuries, Comanches and Kiowas and Kickapoos, Mexicans and Spanish and the other European strains all foraged, collided, killed, displaced, settled. Among the ghosts, a historical curio: the "Buffalo Soldiers," black cavalry troopers, ex-slaves mostly, who were recruited after the Civil War and sent west to help the whites get established in the inhospitable vastness. After 20 years, the work was done. In 1889 the troopers mounted up and rode away from Fort Concho for the last time, while the regimental band played The Girl I Left Behind Me. Four years later, Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed his elegiac thesis that the frontier, the decisive molding influence of the American character, was gone.

Today, in Officers' Quarters No. 7, John Vaughan, 46, director of Fort Concho, plots an act of historical conjuration. "As it was, so it shall be," says a card that decorates the blueprints on his office wall. Vaughan, a 6-ft. 6-in. Tennessean with a voice that sounds like an intellectual version of the old Gunsmoke deputy, Chester, speaks with a sort of loving surprise about the fort. A skilled stonemason and carpenter, as well as historian, Vaughan came to San Angelo from Alabama last year. He wants to build a reproduction of the Fort Concho hospital and install the elementary school there, tearing down the school that now stands in the middle of the old parade ground. The old fort buildings will be occupied by a fine arts museum, by civic groups and even lawyers' offices. But Vaughan wants to remove the outward appearances of the 20th century--the asphalt streets and overhead phone lines, for example--and bring back nearly everything except the bugles and the intense boredom the soldiers suffered 100 years ago when they were not banging up and down the High Plains or getting drunk in San Angelo.

The fort will have to be a labor of tourism as well as historical piety, of course. Since the Bicentennial, Americans have become great refurbishers of the past, though often in a merely Disney way. They want the past to speak to them; but, especially in the '60s and '70s, it occurred to many to wonder whether the past was telling them the truth. John Wayne repeatedly re-enacted one version of the Fort Concho mythology, but the claims of other perspectives have been rising. Wayne Daniel, 38, Fort Concho's librarian and archivist, speaks wistfully about including disparate points of view in the restored fort--perhaps inviting Indians down from Oklahoma to help prepare exhibits. But most of the Indians were either extinguished or driven onto reservations generations ago. The blacks who served at Fort Concho were transients there and mostly illiterate. Even in San Angelo they have left few traces.

In any case, whatever voice history uses in San Angelo must be rich, many layered and full of irony. If every great fortune, as Balzac said, is founded on a crime, a lot of good American towns, especially in the West, were built on nothing more dignified--or sinister, for that matter--than whisky and whorehouses. San Angelo, which now envelops the fort, got its start that way. Its economy in the first days grew robust upon soldiers' payday recreations and the gamy appetites of buffalo hunters. Susan Miles, 89, daughter of one of the earlier settlers, manages to sound both scandalized and amused about the town's atmosphere even after the fort closed down: "Big drinking meant big progress. I remember the painted girls riding around town late in the afternoon with their parasols all different colors. They were the prettiest things in the world."

The black federal soldiers and the townspeople, many of them ex-Confederates, lived in a certain mutual contempt. After a drunken sheepman blew out an unarmed trooper's brains in a saloon one night in 1881, the black soldiers came raging across the river into town and posted a notice: "If we do not receive justice and fair play, which we must have, some one will suffer--if not the guilty, the innocent. It has gone far enough. Justice or death." It was a moment of brave anger in the 19th century, but it passed; the white sheepman was acquitted so quickly the jurors scarcely had to leave their chairs.

So San Angelo (population about 75,000) has had to wait some years to forget a certain distaste for its fort and even its origins. But like most Texans, San Angeloans have an almost tactile relationship with the past--their own history at least. West Texans have not vanished into the anonymity of cities. When Joe Mertz and Willard Johnson, two of the biggest ranchers in San Angelo, get together for a great barbecue or a more elegant dinner at, say, the River Club, someone will probably tell an outsider how Johnson's grandfather spoke so eloquently about West Texas that he persuaded Mertz's grandfather not to get back on the stage he was taking to California.

Nature in West Texas runs to extremes; it demands attention. The land and the weather are dominant presences. No other people in the world are capable of gazing so lovingly upon floodwaters. In the inundations of the past few weeks, after the long drought and heat wave, West Texans stood on bridges over the rivers, over the arroyos and washes, raptly watching the gushing brown waters. So what if a pickup truck or stray livestock went pinwheeling away on the flood? The wilting cotton in fields to the east--some of it, at least--would revive and make it to market after all. The sparse grama and buffalo grass that sheep and cattle had been browsing, almost a blade at a time, would, by West Texas standards, flourish. No wonder that Tom Randall, San Angelo's Cadillac dealer, tripled his sales in the days after the rain.

With austerely magnificent distances and titanic clouds, the High Plains sweep majestically westward. Yet down where the boot treads the topsoil of the range, life can be scruffy; nature is not pastoral. Red ants sting like wasps. A menacing rattle detonates in the brush. Vultures perch prehistorically in the tall mesquite. Across the landscape, black pumps, some how prehistoric too, with slow, rocking rotations ladle up the wealth and the sweetly mephitic odor of oil.

The recession has barely touched San Angelo. Agribusiness, oil exploration, light industries (Levi-Strauss, Ethicon, Mitsubishi), all flourish. The town has a few problems: some crime, a small black slum, a Mexican-American barrio and a poor-white district. Some old Anglo prejudice, the ghost of a snarl, persists in subtle and unspoken ways, though never as sharp as it is down near the border. Lettie Smith, 91 , the daughter of a buffalo soldier, remarks with almost aggressive matter-of-factness: "There is no better place to live in Texas." The rich seem to avoid ostentation as both unmanly and unnecessary. San Angelo is 66 miles from the nearest Interstate. The world seems farther away than it does in Houston or Dallas (regions that West Texans disdain as effete or, at any rate, almost as culturally alien to San Angelo as New York, where the ranchers take their wives sometimes in early December to stay at the St. Regis and shop for Christmas).

Anglo ranchers and cowboys and businessmen live a truculent but some how wistful individualism. Their code is still stiffened by Old West virtues, though they disconsolately sense a twilight coming on. They take the Federal Government's subsidies (drought disaster loans, for instance) because everyone else does, and one has to compete. But where Mexican Americans see the Federal Government as protector, the Anglos tend to think Washington is on the side of the coyotes that kill their sheep and the ubiquitous mesquite that sends down alarming deep roots and drinks the earth dry. Sometimes they feel the rest of the country is ungrateful for all the oil and wool and cotton and beef. They worry about confiscatory inheritance taxes that are breaking up the range into ever smaller pieces. "There will be nothing left but a bunch of little bitty ranchettes for fools from North Carolina," one rancher says sadly.

Before the twilight, the ranchettes and the Government descend. San Angelo aims to rehabilitate Fort Concho, its neglected relic across the Sante Fe tracks, and thus retake at least that portion of the town's complicated past. Across the river on Concho Avenue, where the soldiers used to go, someone else with a more profane sense of history has just gaudily restored a whorehouse, red velvet curtains and all. --By Lance Morrow

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