Fiction: Jaudon – An American Family (a novel) [7]

Click image for more of the saga

Chapter 7. Empire

1881. The post at Fort Griffin is abandoned. Residents of the civilian community begin moving to Albany, the county seat of Shackelford County. Lt. Bullis and 30 Seminole-Negro scouts pursue a band of Lipan Apache raiders into Mexico. It is the last action against Indians conducted by U.S. Army units in Texas.
    1882. The Texas and Pacific Railroad reaches El Paso from Fort Worth. The San Antonio-El Paso stagecoach line goes out of business.

James began to buy land in 1882. He was 33 years old and his empire was growing. He didn’t buy just any land. He bought ranches that surrounded the open range. The open range was government land that everybody could use, and comprised well over 5,000 acres of grassland. It was open to anyone who paid a small fee to the government to graze their animals on it. James couldn’t buy it, but he could block access to a large porion of it.

    He first bought the smaller ranches on the other side of the Guadalupe River. There were no fences then, so owning the land had little meaning to anyone. Then he bought the property adjacent to his. A few Mexicans who didn’t want to sell their land down river ended up with less money for their property and sorrowfully moved back to Mexico. It was hard to say no to J.F. Joudon.
    The large Daves spread south of James’ ranch was a big piece of his puzzle. It was a must-have or nothing would work, and he would have spent a lot of money for nothing.
    He had been friends with Howard Daves for years. Howard had come to Texas a year before James, from Louisana. They rode on two trail drives and drank whiskey together. Outside of Rafael and Charles Goodnight, Howard was the only friend James had. But Howard had returned from the trail drive to California with a cough that turned into pneumonia. He lay dying for two weeks fighting for each breath. His funeral was attended by every rancher within a day’s ride of San Antonio.
    Clara Daves, Howard’s widow, was a fine-looking woman and about as hard as James. She was a tall, fair skinned, blonde Swede, which made her stand out in a land of sunburnt cowboys and Mexicans. She and James had started seeing each other over a year back, after he approached her with a deal to buy her out. On that occasion, she had told him to have a seat, and she pulled out a bottle of whiskey, poured two glasses half full, and sat across from him.
    He raised his glass. “Here’s to Howard.”
    She raised her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
    She paused to set her glass down. “J.F., I won’t sell you this property, but I’ll make you a deal, if I get what I want. You see, I know what you’re up to with buying all this land.”
    “Clara, I’m just expanding my ranch.”
    Clara took up her glass again and knocked back a big gulp of whiskey before banging the glass on the table. “Don’t lie to me, J.F. I’m not Howard. I know what a snake in the grass you can be. Howard thought you were a goddamn saint, but I’ve always known better. The only thing stopping you from blocking off that open range is me.”
    James smiled. He liked Clara. “So what do you plan to do with this information?”
    “Not a damn thing. I will sell you the rights to the land, but I will remain the owner. That way you can do whatever you want with the land but my cattle and house belong to me until I die and I will use the open range along with your cows.”
    James stayed over that night and visited many times afterwards. They weren’t in love but they met each other’s needs. And they respected one another.

    Shortly after that meeting, James’ fences began to go up. First, he blocked off the far bank of the Guadalupe River along the border of his original ranch property, and then he began to fence the land that made a half-moon circle back to Clara’s place touching the lower Guadalupe. When the fencing was completed, the free government land would be landlocked and J.F. Jaudon would have the only key.
    The other ranchers made an uproar, but there was little they could do. He wasn’t stopping them from using the free land, just stopping them from crossing his land to do it. After his house was fired upon late one night, he hired some gunslingers to patrol the fences and guard the house. Juan and Carmen took James’ two boys and moved back to Mexico. Rafael tried to talk some sense into his friend, but the only person James listened to, other than himself, was Clara, and she was enjoying the hell out of the ruckus.

    The large wild herds of longhorn were declining, most having been rounded up and sold by people like J.F. Joudon, Charles Goodnight, and Oliver Loving. Plus the railroads were charging more to ship longhorns. Most ranchers were now breeding their cattle by mixing the longhorn with smaller cows. The new breeds were easier to control and needed less room to roam.
    But the sizes of the herds were nothing like the old days, and bandits were coming across the Rio Grande to steal these cattle and drive them back across the border and on to Mexico City, where they sold them.

    Alejandro Cortez’s ranch was hard hit by these Mexican bandits, and in an attempt to stop or slow the flow of his cattle back to Mexico, Alejandro blew up his bridge. The Texas Rangers reacted in a way he hadn’t even begun to anticipate. They had been using his bridge to chase the rustlers back across the border, and they now accused him of trying to protect them. They took the extraordinary step of hanging him from the arch leading through the wall to his house.

    James wrote a letter to the governor complaining about the killing of his former business partner, but to no avail. The Texas Rangers had free rein outside of the cities. Their word was pretty much law.
    The running of wild cattle had come to an end, and after the Army moved to the border and killed most of the bandits, the bandit border wars came to an end.

    But whether longhorns or new breeds, the one thing all cows still needed was grass, and the Circle J controlled access to it. The Cattlemen’s Association took J.F. to court. James paid off the judge with $2,000, a fortune in 1885, and won the case.
    One night, as Rafael and James were having their whiskey, James did something he had never done before. “Rafael, how do I stop this damn war? If I start killing these ranchers, the Texas Rangers will move in and God only knows what will happen then.”
    Rafael was shocked to have his advice asked for. It had never happened before. What James had asked took a few seconds to sink in. “Mi amigo, there is only one thing they want, and that is the free grass.”
    “I’ve worked too hard and spent too much money to just roll over and let them have it.”
    Rafael finished his drink and looked at the bottom of the glass for a long second. “Then charge them for each head that crosses your property. Let them have the grass but make them pay a toll to get to it. Remember on that drive with Goodnight, when we stopped at Dawson’s ranch? He sure as hell didn’t let us graze the cows without paying. You make your money back and they feed their herds.”
    James poured more whiskey into their glasses. “Do you think they will go along with that?”
    “James, you are losing money and they are losing money. This war isn’t good for anybody, and it will get worse if something doesn’t change. Sit down with the Cattlemen’s Association and work out a deal.”
    “I’ll send a wire tomorrow – we’ll see how they like the idea.”

At the age of 36, in 1885, J.F. Jaudon owned or controlled the largest ranch in Texas. Claude and Ricardo had gone east and enrolled in college. It had taken some doing and a lot of money, but both were at Brown University, with one year to go. Claude was going for an Engineering degree and Ricardo for a degree in banking. Both of them were doing well.
    Clara announced that she was with his child – something she had never thought possible. She and Howard had tried for years and a doctor in Houston had told her she could never conceive a child and there was nothing to be done about it.
    James offered to marry her, but she turned him down flat. It was to be her child, and J.F. would have nothing to do with its raising. After that, their relationship was never the same. Their wild nights of partying and sex were over. In the end, they were more business partners than lovers.

Copyright © 2019 by Ed Rogers