PROLOG
Copyright 2007 by McKinley Chaney - All Rights Reservied
The birth of the Texas Republic, after a long gestation period, an acute travail, and finally the painful delivery at the Alamo, changed history. The United States rose as a nation of influence throughout the world in spite of Spain’s dominance of Texas and the southwest. Spain labored to finance its war with Mexico and with Napoleon. Amid these forces of instability, new forces rose to the forefront – cattle.
Those men who saw the longhorns of Texas as a cash cow brought earthshaking ideas that ran a current of change through the land and the world as well. McKinley Chaney views these changes as brought about not by emperors or generals on the battlefield but by ordinary men, men of principal. These cowboys were not usually high bred or high on the ladder of world renown or high on the ladder of financial success. They were high on the winds, high on the deserts and high on the way of life in a country heretofore unnoticed by most men of influence.
Jim Bowie had settled into the land and mined silver. He already had an interest in the land when smoldering changes came. The flames of liberty ran high on his list and his list elicited the interests of others. Tennessee Volunteers saw the challenge and took up arms with Texas at the Alamo to fight against tyranny.
This novel finds it setting in the days before the war at the Alamo. It weaves threads of influence that bind Texans to those who had interest in the land and would influence the outcome of the war with Mexico. The colonies back east had cast off tyranny in the late seventeen hundreds and defended it against Imperial Britain in New Orleans half a generation before Texas came under the guns of Santa Anna.
The Louisiana Purchase of the western lands opened the west for settlement, offering great distances for expansion of the free world.
Cattle drives, brought on first by the free longhorns scattered across Texas, and later by opening up of massive lands where ranchers raised cows for the Lincoln war and a growing land, required a special brand of men - men who had endurance, skills, and the ability to use their guns, their fists, and their wits to win wars.
That hombre we know as the cowboy stands as no other craftsman in the history of this land and he runs close to any title given around the globe.
Texas became the cradle of the cowboy long before the Easterners began their westward trek across the continent. That old Lone Star stood as a beacon in the middle of the continent but it stood as a stick in the eye of Mexico.
The Spaniards had scattered their best strain of cattle throughout the territory and abandoned them to nature. Nature had blessed the cows with wide-open spaces, water, limited predators, and an ample supply of food. By the time Texas fought the battle at that Alamo Mission in San Tone, the cows had become as wild as the whitetail deer, and probably more plentiful.
The longhorns grazed there for the taking but the indigenous Texas populations had little interest in them. Though some of the Mexican people took the wild cattle for beef when they needed it to sweeten up their frijoles, the number of people to the number of longhorn cows grew imbalanced in the longhorn’s favor.
History indicates that Spain felt the land in Texas next to worthless if it had no gold. However, when Mexico put pressure on the mother country to gain its independence, Spain invited Germans, French, and other Europeans into Texas to help them resist Mexico, now in a bitter struggle for independence. Mexico gained her independence from Spain but lost Texas and the Southwest. The acquisition of the Southwest by the US opened up threads of access and relieved some pressures in the east.
These new Texicans began to treat the cattle as a natural resource. They managed the cattle on huge tracts of land. Mexico had tried to kick out the Easterners. They won a temporary victory for Mexico at the Alamo but that victory soon lost its luster when Sam Houston overtook the Mexican army. Freeing Texas of foreign yokes, Texans organized into an independent republic.
The cowboy managed the cows to mine his own kind of gold in Texas. Not only did gold flow in from cows the cowboy pushed to markets but gold still flows into the hearts of those touched with his demeanor, his character, and his desperate way of life. The cowboy, in his own way fabricated a band of lasting gold.
His world-famous lore will live in infamy throughout untold ages. His songs will entwine the hearts of music listeners and his undying generations of fans will look up to him to keep him immortal. You ask why. Well, you see, a hard land and hard times bred hard men to survive and to tame it, and the cowboy proved the hardest.
We hope you enjoy this edition of Texan by Birth.
