Even to-day it is alien. It is a
part of our Southland, but a South different to any other that we
have. Within it there are no blacks, and yet the whites number but
one in twenty. The rest are swarthy, black-haired men who speak
the Spanish tongue and whose citizenship is mostly a matter of
form.
The stockmen, pushing ahead of the nesters and the tillers of the
soil, were the first to invade the lower Rio Grande, and among
these "Old Ed" Austin was a pioneer. Out of the unmapped prairie
he had hewed a foothold, and there, among surroundings as Mexican
as Mexico, he had laid the beginnings of his fortune.
Of "Old Ed's" early life strange stories are told; like the other
cattle barons, he was hungry for land and took it where or how he
could. There are tales of fertile sections bought for ten cents an
acre, tales of Mexican ranchers dispossessed by mortgage, by
monte, or by any means that came to hand; stories even of some,
more stubborn than the rest, who refused to feed the Austin greed
for land, and who remained on their farms to feed the buzzards
instead. Those were crude old days; the pioneers who pushed their
herds into the far pastures were lawless fellows, ruthless,
acquisitive, mastered by the empire-builder's urge for acres and
still more acres.
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