Following the Grass (2 page)

Soon after the train turned west its troubles began. More than once Angel's nostrils dilated to the acrid smell of gunpowder. A month later, tired and saddle-worn, he crossed into California. There, the war divided attention with the Com-stock and Yuba River. Gold was on everyone's tongue. California was not only the greatest country in the world: it was the richest. Just wait until the war was won!

Now the boy's way led ever northward; through the San Joaquin valley, past the Merced, the Tuolumne, the Sacramento. He was in a sheepman's paradise. Even the Pyrenees could not match the Sierra Nevada.

The basin narrowed as he left Sacramento behind him. He took to the hills and explored upland valleys that dwarfed the
paramera
of his childhood. No longer did great flocks of short-wooled merinos greet his eye. Here was only talk of gold, of the fortunes being taken out of the Feather and the Yuba.

Angel knew he had found the place he sought. The soil was light, sandy—the very finest in the world for sheep. Bunch-grass, wild clover and a variety of salt bush were abundant. Timber was to hand, also. Nothing was wanting. Land was cheap.

The very bigness of the country was in its favor. In three days' journey he had not seen a fence. Best of all, this land was not unlike his homeland. Therefore, from old Nevada City he dispatched word to Guipúscoa.

The residents of Nevada City were not of a discerning mind. To them, Angel was just another Mexican. His features, hair, the color of his skin and his stature should have marked a difference in their eyes, but they failed of it; and largely because Irosabal had a Spanish ring to it, and because the boy spoke Spanish. Later, when out of loneliness and the desire for speech, he consorted with Mexicans, the term “greaser” was applied to him without question.

At the time, the term of contempt meant nothing to Angel. He had not a dozen words of English at his command. Later, though, it was to make a difference. And the tragedy of it! Had he come to California knowing not a word of Spanish, he would have been received as was his due—the first of a distinct, proud, industrious and thrifty race. Instead of which he dowered himself and his brothers with the contempt reserved by Americans for the shiftless, lazy, gambling Mexican peon.

But no matter. Winter was at hand. It proved to he a mild one. Angel went back to the hills and built a cabin. Very little snow fell in the mountains that year. No one appeared to notice the fact, least of all the boy busy with his plans for the coming of his people. Spring came early. In April, he went to Sacramento to meet his brothers.

The newspapers of that day make bare mention of their coming; and yet, there were more than forty in the party—men, women, children. Most of them were related to Angel. The girl to whom he had tossed the blue magpie feather was among them.

Her coming was a surprise arranged by Angel's father. They were married the following day. By the end of the week the party had been provisioned and properly outfitted. Lambing-time was nearly over; the season for buying and selling breeders would follow immediately. Before it began, Angel's party had to be housed. Therefore, he led the way to the valley south of Nevada City without further delay.

There began then such a job of pioneering as America has seldom witnessed. The year was to be long remembered in California. What snow there was in the mountains went off rapidly. The streams rose over night. Sacramento was devastated.

Close on the heels of the flood began the severest drouth in California's history. By midsummer, cattle and sheep were starving. Horses were slaughtered in great numbers in order to save range for the cattle.

Conditions grew steadily worse. Not once during the long hot months did rain fall in the Sacramento Basin. To the north and east, where the foot-hills were timbered, the bunch-grass and dwarf sage survived.

Angel's people profited by this. They were able to buy sheep at their own price. No wonder, then, that before winter came again they were cordially hated by the less fortunate sheepmen of the Basin. And now, for the second year in succession, were the mountains free of snow. The fact was noted this time. It was an ominous sign Spring but proved it—the drouth was unbroken; even in the hills, the sage, hardiest of plants, withered and died.

T
HERE
was nothing for Angel and his people to do but move. But to where? No one came forward to offer them range or help them in their extremity. They were a people apart.

But they knew how to meet misfortune with a brave face. The houses which they had built, the corrals, the crops which they had planted—these and all of the fruits of a year of hard, unremitting, back-breaking toil were lost to them if they moved. Undaunted, they chose to drive their flocks to some new country where they could begin again, to follow the grass as sheepmen ever have done.

Their courage brought them one reward—a new and distinct term of contempt. They were no longer “greasers”; they were “boscos”—a strange corruption of the Spanish
Basque
. “Greasers” quit; these “boscos” were fighters, and accordingly, they were to be watched. There were too many foreigners in California, anyhow!

The Central Pacific was being built. Already the railhead was beyond the Sierra Nevada. Along this route, then, did Angel and his followers go. Those who had horses rode, the others walked, driving their herds before them. In the rear thundered their wagons. California was glad to be rid of them. But it was California's loss.

For nearly a century the way of the pioneer had led westward. Here, then, was the first trek eastward. It made history, for it brought to Nevada its greatest factional fight— the war of the cowboy and the herder. The big cattle-outfits were well established in the valleys north of the Humboldt.

Range was free, but there was no room for sheep. There had been trouble enough already over sheep. Arizona had had a taste of it. Sheep were a Mexican business anyhow.

Nevada was a new state and things were lax, but even if the politicians down in the old Washoe country had no concern with anything that did not affect mining and Virginia City, folks north of the Humboldt could look after themselves. So along the river, from Dufrayne's mill to Fort Halleck, the warning went up—“Sheepmen Stay Out!”

The cowmen did not lack arguments for the stand they took. Sheep huddle closely while grazing. They have an upper and lower set of teeth: so they virtually crop grass and herbage to the very roots, and what they do not eat their knife-like hoofs destroy.

With free-range, it was not to be supposed that herders would keep their flocks moving. At that time, no one gave a thought to the future. The universal intention was to rip out a fortune in a hurry.

If cattle did not destroy the range it was because of the habits with which nature had endowed them, not because of the care or foresight of the men who owned them. Equal carelessness with sheep meant the ruining of the range; for if they grazed time and again over the same land, nothing could survive on it, not even the sheep themselves.

And this was the country to which Angel, as a last resort, led his people I So far, they had followed the railroad, but the construction gangs had only reached the Truckee; so at the river they took the trail to Fort McDermitt. In a general way, their objective was the Owyhee Basin, or, denied that, the valleys of the Tuscarora Range to the south of the Basin.

Before them stretched an arid, semi-desert country. There were no towns. White men were few. In a sense, it was Indian country, for although the Piute was, to all intent, peaceful, he had not forgotten what he and his brothers had done to the white man at Pyramid Lake.

Observe this immigration, then, for what it was—a journey of privation, danger and hardship beneath a scorching sun, and undertaken without previous knowledge of the country through which they were to pass. At the river-crossings, quicksands awaited them; when they left the river their children were to cry and their own tongues grow thick for want of water.

They knew nothing of the desert. They were even less fitted, by experience, for their task than the men and women who had followed Brigham Young across the plains. And at their journey's end, if they won through, was what? Organized hostility, hatred and contempt!

The picture is well-nigh hopeless. Add to it that they were to stop not less than three times to bury their dead beside the trail; that four of their women were to know the anguish and travail of childbirth. Is there aught of misery that was not theirs?

And yet they triumphed. Eventually, in July it was, they crossed the Humboldt for the last time. They were just south of Winnemucca Mountain at about the spot where the town of Winnemucca now stands.

Here the Little Humboldt joins the big river. Due to some miraculous urge of fortune, they chose to follow the smaller stream. It was a happy choice, for surely they never would have been suffered to cross the Tuscaroras.

Almost immediately the country began to change. Small, fertile valleys opened before them. The grass grew green in the creek bottoms; in the distance low, friendly, grayish-green hills, fringed with stunted cedars, arose. Water was always to hand; the creeks were heading in those hills ahead—Willow Creek, Rebel Creek, Martin Creek and a score of small streams as yet unnamed.

Martin Creek was the largest. Soon they came to the spot where it flows into the Little Humboldt. The river bore away to the northeast; the creek's course lay to the north, its promise unmistakable. It was not to be denied!

Angel's party turned to the north. Unknowingly, they were entering the garden spot of northern Nevada—Paradise Valley, so named, ten years before, by a cavalry lieutenant who left his bones to whiten there.

Angel, his five days' old daughter in his arms, was the first of his party across the Martin. He was not aware of a tall, sinewy, sullen-faced man and a boy, a lad of nine, who sat in their saddles upon the opposite bank staring at them as they forced the sheep across the shallow ford.

The man and boy were father and son. A trader had opened a store on Cottonwood Creek (destined to become the town of Paradise), and they had been on their way there when they caught sight of the Basque caravan. Open hostility had flashed in the man's eyes. He was a cowman, a Kentuckian named David Gault. Sheep were as little to his liking as they were to the big outfits in the Basin.

The boy, Joseph, shared his father's anger. In silence, they waited for the strangers to draw near.

“Hit's greasers, all right,” the boy said at last, his mouth hard. “Reckon they air comin' to stay!”

The man shook his head. “Ain't no room fer sheep ner greasers in this yere country, Joseph. We fit the lnjuns fer hit; hit's ourn. Ain't no furriners goin' ter take hit from us. Let 'em come with their sheep—they won't stay long!”

Gault was mistaken. Not only were the Basques to cling tenaciously to Paradise Valley, they were to prosper there, raise their families, draw reinforcements from distant valleys in the Pyrenees and, in the end, become American citizens. And this despite the fact that they were to be reviled, scorned, cheated and warred on for twenty years. Later, the term “greaser” was to be unheard; throughout Nevada and Idaho they were to be just “boscos,” and the word was to be uttered with such bitterness as the Mexican had never drawn.

Early in those twenty years the Central Pacific was to be completed. Prosperity was to follow; towns were to be built—Winnemucca, Golconda, Tuscarora. New settlers were to come, bringing banks, schools and churches.

Among the newcomers there were to be impartial men, but even these were to regard the Basques as a sullen, clannish, not-understandable race. They were to trust them at their banks; for no man could say but what they were honest, prompt in the paying of their debts; but it was only the banker who was to accept the Basque as a proud, thrifty, hard-working man, and therefore a good risk.

And the Basques were to repay their enemies in their own coin. They were, indeed, to become a sullen people, but they had ever been lovers of solitude, dependent on their family life for social pleasures. So, driven in on themselves, they were to become clannish to a degree the Basque had never known in his own land. They knew how to hate and bear a grudge, and, Indian-like, they would not forget.

Twenty years were to bring Basque saloons, inns, stores and forwarding-agents to Winnemucca and Golconda. Paradise was to become a Basque town. What a Basque wanted, he bought from a Basque. Let these
gringos
keep to themselves! They wanted nothing of them. If sheep were killed, cattle could be killed, too; and it often happened that they were.

Angel Irosabal was to foster this spirit. He was to become rich; the father of many children, although none was to take the place of the little Margarida, who had been born in a covered wagon. To those of the rising generation to whom he was not bound by blood, he became
padrino
(godfather), a tie as binding as the blood strain.

His
ahijados
were to be counted by the score. And between himself and the fathers of these children was to exist a bond known only to
com
-
padres
. It was to make him supreme among the Basques.

He was to be the fount of wisdom. For ten years, and for twice ten years, they were to follow him, and he was to rule not only wisely, but well, instilling pride of race in the young—preaching and convincing them of the enormity of their sin should they take to husband or wife one of an alien race. And yet, in the richest years of his life he was to hold himself shamed, betrayed; and the dimpling, black-eyed babe whom he held in his arms to-day, was to be the cause of it.

No hint of that distant shadow rested upon Angel as he pulled his horse to a stop beside the cattleman and his son. A pleasant word was on his tongue as he bowed with Old World courtesy to Gault.

Gault's answer was a sneering grunt: “I don't know where yo're from, stranger, and hit” don't matter, nohow; but I'm a-tellin' ye yuh've toted yore stuff a long ways fer nuthin'. Yo're a-goin' back—way back! This is white folks' country. Ain't no sheepmen a-comin' in yere! I Don't yuh bother 'bout unloadin' them waggins. I'm tellin' yuh—git 'em turned about by ter-morrow! Yuh can't stay here!”