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August 30, 2001
A CounterPunch
Journey From Texas to Petrolia
Texas Germans, Cactus Smuggling
And Other Adventures
In the Lower Deserts
By Alexander Cockburn
I had been planning to head straight
across Texas to El Paso with a detour south to Big Bend state
park which sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande, also passing
through Marfa which used to, maybe still does, feature Rock Hudson's
house in Giant, then coming north again to the Balmorhea springs,
with beautiful stone work done by the CCC in the 1930s. I was
there years, in 1988, while driving a 1960 Plymouth Valiant across
country. But this July it was ferociously hot and though the
62 Plymouth station wagon was running well, its venerable air
conditioning more than satisfactory, I didn't fancy the thought
of breaking down in the middle of the Cuesta de Burro mountains.
So, prior to the visit to Midland described last week, I headed
north west for the Texas hill country, the region of the Pedernales
often associated with the ranch and memory of LBJ, and an hour
later found myself in Fredericsburg, which offers the curious
traveler not only the Admiral Nimitz museum of the Pacific War,
plus the George H. Bush Gallery, but also a profusion of German
restaurants, each displaying meat-heavy, schlag-strewn menus
in the broiling Texan forenoon.
Consulting a copy of Roemer's
Texas I found in the public library in Midland I found out why.
This same Friedrich von Roemer is noted as the father of Texan
geology, hence grandfather of the delighted cries of Texan oilmen
whenever the geology of Texas yielded its proper bounty. In 1845
Roemer visited Texas and published an excellent account of his
explorations four years later, correctly deprecating most previous
writings on the state as "crude untruths and fabulous exaggerations".
I was glad to see that Roemer reserved particular venom for Captain
Marryat, author of such nineteenth works of boys' fiction as
the loathsome Masterman Ready and The Children of the New Forest.
In 1839 Marryat published A Diary in America, derided by Roemer
as either the author's exaggerations or, in the case of the few
facts,
plagiarized without acknowledgement from others. "The reader,"
Roemer sniffed, "can look for everything else in the book
except the true state of affairs as to the natural conditions
of Texas".
The big German drive to colonize
Texas came in the 1840s, with a company, or "Verein"
set up for this purpose in Mainz. A hundred and fifty families
were each guaranteed 320 acres and set sail. Disaster followed.
The Verein had been sold 450 square miles of Texas real estate
by a Frenchman called Bourgeois d'Orvanne, but the German settlers
found to their mortification that the Frenchman was a con man
and owned not a single acre. This crisis was only solved when
the Verein's man on the spot, Prince Carl zu Solms-Braunfels
bought several thousand acres on the road from San Antonio to
Austin, establishing the city of New Braunfels.
Captivated by the Verein's
pledges of land, a fresh wave of immigrants, several thousand
in number, arrived in Galveston in the spring of 1846, only to
find that the Verein had no money to transport them to the site
of the future city of Fredericsburg. Alternately broiled by the
savage sun or drenched by the unusual rains of that year the
wretched Germans lay on the sandy coast in sod houses or tents.
Malaria began to decimate them and war with Mexico broke out.
With nothing better to do, the settlers formed a volunteer corps
to fight for Texas.
At last they began the trek
to New Braunfels. "The course along the Guadalupe,"
Roemer wrote mournfully three years later, "was marked by
countless German graves. All moral ties were dissolved and the
prairie was witness to deeds of violence, from which the natural
feelings revolt and which sullied the German name." More
than a thousand died, and with them the German drive for colonization.
Nonetheless when LBJ was a kid many high schools in that region
were teaching in German, a good example of the foolishness of
the faction demanding that English be the sole language.
The Fredericsburg inspected
by Roemer still had tree stumps in its streets and one of the
settlers chopping down oak trees was no doubt the forebear of
Chester Nimitz, admiral in overall charge of the war in the Pacific,
in whose honor a fine museum now offers Fredericsburg's prime
historical amenity. Actually, the George H. Bush gallery is a
very fine addition to Texas's excellent museums, with huge dioramas
of carrier flight decks, Japanese mini-subs and a faithful recreation
of Tojo's study.
In the South church signs are
more urgent than those further west. In Louisiana, on a chapel
in Abbeville I saw "Each time Satan knocks, let Jesus answer
the door." In the southwest things seem more relaxed. On
the way out of Texas into New Mexico I pass a sign for Central
Baptist Church with a sign "Relax I'm in control, God, Philippians
4, 6." Later I look this up in the King James translation
of the Bible to see what was offered as biblical authority for
this soothing admonition. Verse 6 says "Be careful for nothing;
but in everything by prayer and supplication let your requests
be made known unto God." This is the slightly older meaning
of careful, in the sense of anxiety, as opposed to the more modern
intimation of the word, of caution.
From the balcony of the Carlsbad
Motel, I can see the signs on the back of a long building the
other side of the fence read Leopard Lounge Café, Got
Furniture and Structured Chaos. Nauseated by the disgusting food
in a nearby franchise I eat the remainder of my boiled crabs,
and next day head north to Artesia, soon enough espying the Chaos
Café. Inside a sign said "If you think you have a
reservation, you're in the wrong place" and a longer sign
in the entry way offered the thought "If it is true that
remodeling and effective cleaning require disarray, and if we
want change and purity in our lives, and if we have asked JESUS
to bring growth, Why are we surprised and dismayed when the process
begins with CHAOS."
Across the Guadeloupe mountain
range and down into Alamogordo, 60 miles south of the Trinity
site, point zero for explosion of America's first nuclear device.
It's hard to drive far across the American West without passing
a military base or a prison. I drive into White Sands National
Monument, which is surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range,
some 4,000 square miles of desert which hosted America's first
efforts to adapt German rockets, with Nazi scientists toiling
happily in their new homes, spirited westward by the same US
intelligence services that extricated Klaus Barbie and sent him
to Bolivia.
One such scientist was Georg Richkey who was the supervisor at
the Mettelwerk missile complex that used slave labor from the
Dora concentration camp. In retaliation against sabotage in the
plant (prisoners would piss on electrical equipment, causing
spectacular malfunctions) Richkey would hang them twelve at a
time from factory cranes, with wooden sticks shoved into their
mouths to muffle their cries. Later US intelligence officers
obstructed efforts by the allies, also the US State Department,
to try Richkey as a war criminal and brought him to the US where
he resumed his missile work at Wright AFB.
I drove for a while through
the white gypsum dunes which constitute the prime allurement
of the Monument, whose best feature is actually the adobe reception
and office buildings designed and put up by Hispanic laborers
under the supervision of a Kansa journalist had successfully
campaigned for the Monument in the 1930s. The buildings are now
deservedly on the register of historic structures.
That evening I drive along the main street of Truth or Consequences.
I notice that the South West Pharmacy has a sign below it, Ask
Us About Free Prozac. Below that is another sign for the Wellness
Store "A Neural Pharmacy"
Across the street I see the
hot Springs Health Center. I pick the Trail motel ($24, good
wide front court, nice sign, Christians, no phone in the room.)
As for the town's name, I'd
always imagined it came from some cowboy bet in the 1880s. Not
a bit of it. In 1950, so the Chaparral Guide in my motel told
me, NBC TV and radio producer Ralph Edwards took the occasion
of the tenth anniversary of his program Truth or Consequences
to put out the word that he wished "some town in the US
liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change
its name to Truth or Consequences". The Mexico State Bureau
of tourism promptly relayed his hope to the manager of the Hot
Springs Chamber of Commerce. At long last an opportunity to
shake off the town's second best status to Hot Springs Arkansas,
playpen of Boy Clinton. In a special election 1294 of the citizenry
voted for the change with 294 opposed. Amid cries from the vanquished
traditionalists there was soon a second poll with the same result.
The people were asked to voted again on the matter in 1964 and
yet again in 1967, which suggests the diehards were still fighting.
I have another disgusting meal
in La Coquina, probably the worst effort at "Mexican"
chow I've ever encountered, which is saying a lot, starting with
ketchup pretending to be salsa.
The next day, deliberating
on a back road whether to make a detour and visit the Gila Cliff
Dwellings I finally decide it's too late and swing back onto
a larger road. Red lights promptly go on and I see a state patrol
car with two cops in it. After a long interval during which they
check me out, a young cop comes over and leans through the passenger
window. He alleges I rolled past a red stop sign and then asks
me what I'm doing in this part of New Mexico. His ferretty little
eyes swivel around the back of the station wagon, linger on some
cactuses I've picked up in a nursery in Truth or Consequences,
linger further on my Coleman ice chest and then came back to
my car papers. Either this is a training session for Ferret Eyes
or a pretext stop to see if I'm carrying drugs. Armed with my
license and car papers the two spend another 20 minutes on their
radio. Finally Ferret Eyes comes back and lays a $49 citation
on me, inquiring as to whether I plead guilty as charged or want
to fight it out in the courts. This all seems hurried and devoid
of due process, but I tell him I won't fight it. I roll on my
way, soured on New Mexico.
In contrast to the carefree
posture of the Baptists, leaving God to sort it all out, the
signs outside high schools mostly flaunt the worry-ridden "Have
a safe summer" until I get to Globe, NM, a mining town on
state highway 70, whose high school sign dares to say, Have a
happy summer".
Fear is everywhere. Various
newspapers in the south west, were carrying a news story alerting
us to the perils of charred steak or chicken, now listed along
with mothballs, and shampoos as among the 218 substances suspected
by the National Institute of Envior4nmental Health Sciences of
causing cancer. As the health group's director, Christopher Portier
concedes, "Anything that's fun tends to be hazardous to
your health." So we're enjoined not to cook steak or chicken
over heat in excess of 400 degrees. Trouble is, the USDA simultaneously
implores us to turn up the broiler to full power to avoid the
supposed perils of underdone meat, possible sanctuary of lethal
bacteria. Barbecue is probably the only way for carnivores
to go.
Mines,
Prisons and Cacti
I stood alongside two Mexican
tourists looking through a chainlink fence at an enormous hole
in the ground. Somewhere near the New Mexico/Arizona line it
was maybe half a mile across and easily as deep, though the clarity
of the air could have been deceiving and the whole void could
have been a cubic mile. There's nothing like an open-pit mine
to remind you of what man, in this instance the Phelps Dodge
Company, will do in the great cause of making a buck, and though
there was no signing of active digging in progress I've no doubt
that some twitch in the price of copper or whatever else it was
Phelps Dodge had been gouging out of that hole could have sent
the big cutting machines into action once more.
We could see the geology in
cross section, layered green, dark blue, red and sandy white
as, somewhere back in ur-time, the various strata had heaved
and settled themselves in a arrangement that half a billion years
later proved most satisfactory to the stockholders of Phelps
Dodge, a company of infamous repute, not least for its curt command
to that despicable invertebrate known as Bruce Babbitt to bring
out the State Troopers to break a strike.
Only a few days earlier, back
in Alabama, I'd been reading a terrifying story in the Wall Street
Journal, a truly brilliant and important piece of historical
research by a WSJ reporter called Douglas Blackmon, into the
way US companies, including units of US Steel, had contracted
with the state of Alabama to recruit cheap prison labor to dig
coal, notably at the Pratt mining complex outside Birmingham.
The total number of those sent into the mines over the 60-year
span of the system probably far exceeded 100,000.
The reporter had the temerity
to note that in June a $4.5 billion fund set up by German corporations
began making payments last month to the victims
of Nazi slave-labor programs during the 1930s and 1940s and that
Japanese manufacturers now face demands for compensation for
their alleged use of forced labor during the same period.
Maybe the profiteers from mines
in Shelby County, Alabama should face some questions too and
victims or their offspring be vindicated. "In the U.S.,
many companies -- real-estate agents that helped maintain rigid
housing segregation, insurers and other financial-services companies
that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all
stripes that discriminated in hiring -- helped maintain traditions
of segregation for a century after the end of the Civil War.
But in the U.S., recurrent calls for reparations to the descendants
of pre-Civil War slaves have made little headway. And there has
been scant debate over compensating victims of 20th century racial
abuses involving businesses."
Most of the convicts condemned
to the coal mines in Shelby county were charged with minor offenses
or violations of "Black Code" statutes passed to reassert
white control in the aftermath of the Civil War. "Subjected
to squalid living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food
and frequent floggings, thousands died. Entries on a typical
page from a 1918 state report on causes of death among leased
convicts include: 'Killed by Convict, Asphyxia from Explosion,
Tuberculosis, Burned by Gas Explosion, Pneumonia, Shot by Foreman,
Gangrenous Appendicitis, Paralysis.'
The system was simplicity itself.
The sheriffs and guards made their living off commissions on
supplying the black convict labor, also by pocketing the difference
between the food money they were allocated and the slops they
actually dished out to the convicts. The pretexts for arrests
were trivial or non-existent, such as being rowdy, riding the
rails, looking at a white woman (unless the glance was of a quality
that required a lynching). Fines were imposed and since the blacks
had no money, the men were sent to the coal mines instead, with
years added on to cover "court costs". What followed
was most often a prolonged death sentence, by dint of overwork,
starvation and then sickness, unless the process was speeded
up by being beaten to death with a pickax handle by one of the
guards.
Some Alabama officials in the
late nineteenth century were horrified. At the Pratt Mines an
observer for
a special Alabama legislative committee in 1897 wrote a report
describing 1,117 convicts, many "wholly unfit for the work,"
at labor in the shaft. The men worked standing in pools of putrid
water. Gas from the miners' headlamps and smoke from blasts of
dynamite and gun powder choked the mine. The convict board's
death registers show that in the final decade of the 19th century,
large numbers of men died when diarrhea and dysentery periodically
swept through the Pratt Mines. Citing inadequate food, beatings
of miners and unsanitary conditions, state inspectors periodically
issued reports criticizing the mine's operators, initially
Pratt Coal & Coke Co. and later Tennessee Coal, which acquired
Pratt Coal in the late 1800s.
Men were priced depending on
their health and their ability to dig coal. Under state rules
adopted in 1901, a "first class" prisoner had to cut
and load into mine cars four tons of coal a day to avoid being
whipped. That's 8,000 pounds, maybe three or four times the weight
of a Volkswagen. As revenue from the lease system rose, companies
took over nearly all the penal functions of the state. Since
they had to pay a penalty to the state of Alabama if any prisoner
escaped, company guards were empowered and had ample incentive
to shoot prisoners attempting to flee and, well into the 20th
century, to strip disobedient convicts naked and whip them.
"The demand for labor
and fees has become so great that most of them now go to the
mines where many of them are unfit for such labor; consequently
it is not long before they pass from this earth," wrote
Shirley Bragg,
president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, in a September
1906 report to Alabama's governor. "Is it not the duty of
the State to see that proper treatment is accorded these poor
defenseless creatures, many of whom ought never have been arrested
and tried at all?" Such protests notwithstanding, the system
continued.
U.S. Steel bought Tennessee
Coal in 1907. U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert H. Gary, after whom
the Indiana steel town is named, was a man of progressive reputation.
He commanded his subordinates that association of US Steel or
its subsidiaries with the penal system of Alabama should cease.
It didn't. That same year 50 black convicts set fire to the mine
in an attempt to escape and many were suffocated or roasted alive.
One executive noted that U.S. Steel's "chief inducement
for the hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal
for our manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor
troubles."
Any governor of Arizona has
as one of his prime functions the provision of cheap water, transported
at public expense, for the big real estate and agricultural interests
of the state. That night, ensconced in my Days Inn in the little
south-eastern Arizona town of Safford, I was able to gaze at
the great cotton fields surrounding the town as they have for
decades now, with the abundant water sloshing through the ditches.
Over on the south-east horizon was Mount Graham, sacred to the
Apache and sanctuary to the endangered red squirrel, both of
which attributes are being swiftly destroyed by the mighty telescopes
installed with the vehement support of Senator John McCain, also
the Vatican which endorsed the telescopes as vital for the search
of the cosmos for further possible converts to Christendom.
Along state highway 70 I rolled
next day through Globe and on route 60, its nearby satellite
of Miami, where one is afforded a definitive vignette of the
role on environmental regulation, in the form of a vast, awful
mine, like a cross between something out of Caspar Friedrich
and a Fritz Lang nightmare; a mountain of shale, its base oozing
green puss, topped by a mining building, the whole thing a thousand
feet high, and right at the bottom, next to the highway a tiny
shack labeled "Environmental Compliance" and next to
this the cryptic sign, "Zero and Beyond".
Then came more mines and astounding
red rock, sandstone formations and then, ten minutes later, the
other side of the range, a sign for the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.
I rolled right past it and then, always a sucker for gardens
and arboreta, made a U and went in. So glad I did, since these
1,075 acres of the Sonoran desert nestling at the base of Picketpost
mountain now comprise one of the premier horticultural attractions
of the country, for which we can thank William Boyce Thompson
and, no doubt, Mrs Thompson.
He was a mining engineer from
Montana, who made his pile figuring out where to dig some of
the big holes I had been gazing at a few minutes earlier. Flush
with income from the Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company
at Globe-Miami Thompson won his honorary title of "colonel"
by leading a Red Cross expedition to Russia in 1917. As he marched
across the arid Asian steppes towards St Petersburg the colonel
became mightily impressed not only by the extreme hunger he witnessed
on all sides but also by the fact that what little food the locals
had often came from plants. All foods, the colonel suddenly appreciated,
comes originally from plants. Back in Arizona he swiftly laid
plans for an arid land arboretum where plants from the world's
deserts could be brought together, their uses assayed and their
seeds distributed. Work began in 1923 and by 1929 it was up and
running as a joint project of the Arboretum, the Forest Service,
the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Civilian Conservation Corps.
These days there are over 3000 different plants flourishing at
Boyce Thompson and among the beneficiaries of the Colonel are
sperm whales, a substitute for whose oil is the oil pressed from
seeds of the desert jojoba bush, now planted on a large scale
in Arizona.
I wandered about in the 105
degree heat and soon saw in the distance the tapering trunk,
some 35 feet high, of Idria columnaris, otherwise known as the
Boojum, whose erroneous identification proved so fatal to the
baker in Lewis Carroll's masterpiece of the comic, yet uncanny,
the Hunting of the Snark. All around were marvelous cacti and
kindred succulents such as euphorbias and agaves.
A few years ago I tried to
collect orchids and swiftly realised that the cost and effort
involved is kindred to living with a series of petulant film
stars. Orchids are never happy, are always complaining. This
year I shifted to cacti and have been a happy man. Water and
feed them every four weeks or so and they repay you with an attractive
presence, plus wonderful blooms once or twice a year. If they
suffer, it's a silent and, at least in the short term, invisible
pain.
The arboretum, which must be
a particular miracle to visit in the spring when the desert is
in bloom, has many interesting cacti for sale and I loaded up
the '62 Plymouth station wagon, which was already freighted with
cacti and a Madagascar Palm I'd bought in Truth or Consequences.
I headed west through Phoenix,
then onto Interstate 10 towards Blythe, California. Beside the
highway ran the power lines and I thought of that great son of
the desert, Edward Abbey, and his malediction in the Monkey
Wrench Gang: "All this fantastic effort giant machines,
road networks, strip mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry
lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar
coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high-tension
towers and high-voltage power lines; the devastation of the landscape,
the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian
shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last
big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United
States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies all that
ball-breaking labor and all that back-breaking expense and all
the heartbreaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for
what? All for what? Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs
not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los
Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in
the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride
factories, and copper smelters, to charge the neon-tubing that
makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque,
Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropoli of southern
California, to keep alive that phosphorescent petrifying glory
(all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville,
U.S.A."
A few yards after the Colorado
river there was a checkpoint staffed by the California dept
of Agriculture. A tough looking fellow took one glance through
the window of my station wagon at the cacti within and demanded
proof of origin and purchase. Fortunately I managed to find a
tag from the Arboretum, but he wasn't entirely satisfied, pointing
at the Madagascar palm and saying it looked as though I'd dug
it up myself. Finally he let me through and I went off down the
interstate wondering whether the big cactus smugglers used geezers
in old station wagons as mules to shift product.
Next days I remarked on the
fierce inspection to young Rick, who runs an excellent little
roadside cactus store at Four Corners, where 58 crosses 395
and he told me that all cacti in the US are protected, and indeed
gangs do dig them up in the desert for later sale. A substantial
saguaro can cost hundreds of dollars. When the Arizona highways
dept has to move a cactus the road crews will tag it, sell it
to a dealer who can then legally put it up for sale. He told
me I was lucky to have got my plants through, even though their
papers were basically in order. Then he started cursing as, from
behind a trailer in the Arco station down the road a helicopter
rose noisily. Four Corners consists of about six gas stations
and apparently the local county bureaucracy agreed with the complaint
of the Arco man that Rick's cactus store constitutes an eyesore,
since it has green, living things for sale. He's having to move
round the corner where the truckers and tourists racing along
58 towards Tehachapi and Bakersfield won't be distracted by offensive
flora.
Drive through interior California
and you drive past prisons. In Adelanto the mother and daughter
who ran the local Days Inn told me that they already had two
in town, one state and one federal, and were scheduled for three
more. Higher up Interstate 5 you pass Avenal and Coalinga, with
others over the horizon. In San Jose the headlines spoke of further
implosion in the e-markets. Hewlett Packard was set to lay off
thousands worldwide. I chugged up through the wine country and
into Humboldt county and in mid-afternoon, 4000 miles, and ten
days after I left Landrum, SC, having needed only one quart of
oil and having established an average of 17mpg, the '62 Plymouth
Belvedere swung into my yard in Petrolia. Five minutes later
two F-14s, or maybe F-18s flew down the tiny valley 500 feet,
amid a deafening roar. "The sound of freedom", they
used to call it. These were pilots being assholes. I watched
my horses jump about four feet in the air. A mile down river,
Margie Smith's old horse jumped too, wounded itself on a fence
post and bled to death. CP
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