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by Louis Fairchild Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2002 352 pp.; $29.95 |
Leaving Fort Worth, Texas, heading west on Highway 287, drivers will see a sign that reads, "Amarillo 303." Where I grew up, in Michigan, there were no signs that read "303 miles" to anywhere. We could reach Kentucky to the South or Canada to the North in fewer miles. Like many Midwestern families, mine believed that a 100-mile drive into northern Michigan was far enough for a week-long vacation, maybe two weeks if General Motors had been generous that year. In Texas, however, everything is big, especially distance. All of New England can fit comfortably in the Texas panhandle—although no New Englander would actually feel comfortable there—and there is room enough for Pennsylvania in Central Texas, even if Philadelphians would struggle a bit with the accent.
Louis Fairchild wants us to think about how the distance and emptiness of west Texas roughly a century ago contributed to a deep sense of loneliness. In The Lonesome Plains: Death and Revival on an American Frontier, Fairchild argues that funerals and revival meetings were the two most important institutions for ameliorating the effects of the vast empty plains. His sources include frontier memoirs, many of them by women, and his own oral history interviews conducted in the mid-1980s. The result is a snapshot of what life was like on the Texas frontier during the period from about 1870 through the first decade of the 20th century. And if the west Texas frontier appears rather static in this account—there's no sense of significant change over that 40-year span—perhaps that's the way it was.
In memoir after memoir, as Fairchild shows, loneliness loomed large. Men and women recall going weeks and sometimes months without seeing anyone outside their own family, and no wonder. The first census of the Texas panhandle, in 1880, counted roughly 1600 residents scattered over 25,000 square miles, with six counties having no inhabitants at all. This amounts to a per-square-mile population density of .06. American historians will recall from their readings of Frederick Jackson Turner that the 1890 census taker pronounced the frontier closed, since there was no longer a western line beyond which there were fewer than two people per square mile. But clearly the frontier lived on well past 1890 in many pockets of the West. Reading Fairchild's report of a 14:1 male-female ratio in the panhandle, we can believe the ranch hand who reported that a woman who arrived in his area in 1887 was the first he had seen in four years. A Fourth of July picnic in 1879 included five women, all the females in a three-county area around Chillicothe. No wonder several women in Fairchild's interviews and memoirs reported their longing for female companionship.
All this amounts to loneliness aplenty. People were so thrilled to see a fellow human being that they were more than willing to feed, clothe, and house anyone who happened through their land. In one of Fairchild's stories the woman of the house wakes her boarder (another woman) in the middle of the night, announcing, "You have slept long enough, I am lonesome for someone to talk to." Others longed for companionship so intensely they sought refuge with the animals, sleeping among the cattle, sheep, or even chickens. As is well documented elsewhere, men found liquid solace in saloons. From south Texas to Kansas, the towns that dotted the cattle drive trails were notorious for hard drinking and hard brawling, especially during the brief period of the cattle drives and open range. Most of Fairchild's subjects came later, after the west had settled down, but Fairchild's west Texas was even more intensely lonely than it had been during the heyday of the drives.
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