“Beyond the Brazos River”

Published in The End of the Trail: Western Stories, 2005.
Excerpts from letters to H. P. Lovecraft, August 1931 and October 1931,
selected, arranged and titled by the editor, from copies of original letters provided by Glenn Lord.

Cover from the collection The End of the Trail: Western Stories (2005).

A student of early Texas history is struck by the fact that some of the most savage battles with the Indians were fought in the territory between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. A look at the country makes one realize why this was so. After leaving the thickly timbered littoral of East Texas, the westward sweeping pioneers drove the red men across the treeless rolling expanse now called the Fort Worth prairie, with comparative ease. But beyond the Trinity a new kind of country was encountered—bare, rugged hills, thickly timbered valleys, rocky soil that yielded scanty harvest, and was scantily watered. Here the Indians turned ferociously at bay and among those wild bare hills many a desperate war was fought out to a red finish. It took nearly forty years to win that country, and late into the ’70s it was the scene of swift and bloody raids and forays—leaving their reservations above Red River and riding like fiends the Comanches would strike the cross-timber hills within twenty-four hours. Then it was touch and go! Much as one may hate the red devils one must almost admire their reckless courage—and it took courage to drive a raid across Red River in those days! They staked their lives against stolen horses and white men’s scalps. Some times they won, and outracing the avengers, splashed across Red River and gained their tipis, where the fires blazed, the drums boomed and the painted, feathered warriors leaped in grotesque dances celebrating their gains in horses and scalps—some times they did not win and those somber hills could tell many a tale of swift retribution—of buzzards wheeling low and red-skinned bodies lying in silent heaps.

But that was in the later days. In the old times the red-skins held the banks of the Brazos. Sometimes they drove the ever-encroaching settlers back—sometimes the white men crossed the Brazos, only to be hurled back again, sometimes clear back beyond the Trinity. But they came on again—in spite of flood, drouth, starvation and Indian massacre. In that debatable land I was born and spent most of my early childhood. Little wonder these old tales seem so real to me, when every hill and grove and valley was haunted with such wild traditions!

Yes, the region between the Trinity and the Brazos saw many a red drama enacted. I remember an old woman, a Mrs. Crawford, whom I knew as a child, and who was one of the old settlers of the country. A gaunt, somber figure she was behind whose immobile countenance dreamed red memories. I remember the story she used to tell of the fate of her first husband, a Mr. Brown, in the year 1872.

One evening some of the stock failed to come up and Mr. Brown decided to go and look for them. The Browns lived in a big two-storied ranch-house, several miles from the nearest settlement—Black Springs. So Brown left the ranch-house, hearing the tinkling of a horse-bell somewhere off among the mesquite. It was a chill dreary day, grey clouds deepening slowly toward the veiled sunset. Mrs. Brown stood on the porch of the ranch-house and watched her husband striding off among the mesquites, while beyond him the bell tinkled incessantly. She was a strange woman who saw visions, and claimed the gift of second-sight. Smitten with premonition, but held by the fatalism of the pioneers, she saw Brown disappear among the mesquites. The tinkling bell seemed slowly to recede until the tiny sound died out entirely. Brown did not reappear, and the clouds hung like a grey shroud, a cold wind shook the bare limbs and shuddered among the dead grasses, and she knew he would never return. She went into the house, and with her servants—a negro woman and boy—she barred the doors and shuttered the windows. She put buckets of water where they would be handy in case of fire, she armed the terrified blacks, and led them into the second story of the ranch-house, there to make their last stand. She herself went out upon the balcony of the second story and waited silently. And soon again she heard the tinkle of a horse-bell; and with it many bells. Cow-bells jangled a devil’s tune as the mesquite bent and swayed and the riders swept in view—naked, painted men, riding hard, with cow-horns on their heads and cow-tails swinging grotesquely from their girdles. They drove with them a swarm of horses, some of which Mrs. Brown recognized as her own property, and at their saddle-bows swung fresh crimson scalps—one of these had a grim familiarity and she shuddered, but stood unmoving, starkly impassive. Inside the house the blacks were groveling and whimpering with terror. The Comanches swept around the house, racing at full speed. They loosed their arrows at the statue-like figure on the upper balcony and one of the shafts tore a lock of hair from her head. She did not move, did not shift the long rifle she held across her arm. She knew that unless maddened by the death or wounding of one of their number, they would not attack the house. That one arrow flight had been in barbaric defiance or contempt. They were riding hard, spurred on by the thought of avengers hot on their trail, light-eyed fighters, as ferocious as themselves. They were after horses—the Comanche’s everlasting need—they had lured the rancher to his doom with a tinkling horse-bell. They would not waste time and blood storming the ranch-house. They did not care to come to grips with that silent impassive figure who stood so statue-like on the upper balcony, terrible with potentialities of ferocity, and ready to spring and die like a wounded tigress among the embers of her home. Aye, they would have paid high for that scalp—there would have been no futile screams of terror, no vain pleas for mercy where no mercy ever existed, no gleeful slitting of a helpless soft throat; there would have been the billowing of rifle-smoke, the whine of flying lead, the emptying of saddles, riderless horses racing through the mesquite and red forms lying crumpled. Aye, and the drinking of knives, the crunching of axes, and hot blood hissing in the flames, before they ripped the scalp from that frontier woman’s head.

Silent she stood and saw them round up all the horses on the ranch, except one in a stable they overlooked—and ride away like a whirlwind, to vanish as they had come—as the Comanches always rode. They came like a sudden wind of destruction, they struck, they passed on like the wind, leaving desolation behind them. Taking the one horse that remained to her, she went into the mesquites and some half a mile from the house she found her husband. He lay among the dead grasses, with a dozen arrows still protruding from him, his scalped head in a great pool of congealed blood. With the aid of the blacks who had followed her, wailing a wordless dirge of death, she lifted the corpse across the horse and carried it to the ranch-house. Then she put the black boy on the horse and sent him flying toward Black Springs, whence he soon returned with a strong force of settlers. They saw the dead man and the tracks of the marauders; the wind blew cold and night had come down over the hills, and they feared for their own families. Mrs. Brown bade them go to their respective homes and leave her as a guard in case of the return of the slayers, only Captain McAdams, with whom, she said, she would feel as safe as with an army. So this was done, but the Comanches did not return. They swept in a wide half circle like a prairie fire, driving all the horses they found before them, and outracing the avengers, crossed Red River and gained their reservations and the protection of a benevolent Federal government.

Mrs. Brown was Mrs. Crawford when I knew her. A strange woman, and one whom the countryside looked on as a “medium”; a seer of visions and a communer with the dead. After she married Crawford, he went forth one day to look for his horses, just as her former husband had. Again it was a cold drear day, gloomed with grey clouds. Crawford rode away awhile before sundown and she heard his horse’s hoofs dwindle away on the hard barren ground. The sun sank and the air grew cold and brittle. On the wings of a howling blue blizzard night shut down and Crawford did not come. Mrs. Crawford retired after awhile, and as she lay in the darkness, with the wild wind screaming outside, suddenly a strange feeling came over her which she recognized as the forerunner of a vision. The room filled suddenly with a weird blue light, the walls melted away, distance lost its meaning and she was looking through the hills, the long stretches of mesquite, the swirling blue distances and the night, upon the open reaches of prairie. Over the prairie blew an unearthly wind, and out of the wind came a luminous cloud and out of the cloud a horseman, riding hard. She recognized her husband, face set grimly, rifle in his grasp, and on him a blue army coat such as she had never seen before. He rode in utter silence; she did not hear the thunder of his ride, but beneath his horse’s hoofs that spurned the hard earth, the dead prairie grass bent and the flints spat fire. Whether he rode alone she could not tell, for the luminous cloud closed in before and behind and he rode in the heart of the cloud. Then as a mist fades the vision faded and she was alone in the dark room with the wind screaming about the house and the wolves howling along the gale. Three days later Crawford came home, riding slowly on a weary horse. The blizzard had blown itself out; the cold sunlight warmed the shivering prairies and Crawford wore no coat, as when he had ridden away. He had not found his horses, but he had found the tracks of the raiders who had taken them, and while examining them, a band of settlers had swept past on the trail, shouting for him to follow. And he had followed and in the teeth of the freezing blizzard they had harried the marauders to the very banks of Red River, emptying more than one saddle in that long running fight. She asked about the coat, the blue army coat she had seen in the vision, and he replied with surprize that he had stopped at a settler’s house long enough to borrow the coat, and had returned it as he rode back by, returning from the chase.

Many a time, as a child have I listened to her telling strange tales of old times when white men and red men locked in a last struggle for supremacy. I wandered around her old ranch-house in awe. It was not the memories of Indian forays that made me shiver—it was the strange tales the country folk told—of doors in the old ranch-house that opened and closed without human agency, of an old chair rocking to and fro in the night in an empty room. In this chair Crawford had spent his last days. Men swore that the chair rocked at night, as he had rocked, and his old spittoon clinked regularly, as it had clinked in his life-time when he rocked, chewing tobacco, and from time to time spat. Mrs. Crawford was a true pioneer woman. No higher tribute could be paid her. I liked and admired her, as I admire her memory. But to me as a child, she was endowed with a certain awesomeness, not only as far as I was concerned, but to the country-folk in general.

“Beyond the Brazos River”

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