By the end of summer, most Texans were certain that if slavery was abolished, the whole of the South would Africanize, no proper woman would be safe, amalgamation would be the order of the day. Though in the next breath they would tell you that the war had nothing to do with slavery. It was about human dignity, self-governance, freedom itself, the

Men are meant to be ruled. The poor man prefers to associate, in mind if not in body, with the rich and successful. He rarely allows himself to consider that his poverty and his neighbor’s riches are inextricably linked, for this would require action, and it is easier for him to think of all the reasons he is superior to his other neighbors, who

“And this Sun Dance they all talk about?

DESPITE THE DISAPPEARANCE of the last of the original Mexican families (many of whom have been here five or ten generations—longer than any white), a new crop has arrived to fill their places.

The displaced tribes—from the easterners like the Chickasaws and Delawares to the more local Wichitas and Osages—continued to be resettled in our hunting grounds.

Still the shadow has not appeared. Have begun to look in all the dark places, out of the corner of my eye, but . . . nothing.

By summer we knew that the Penateka, the largest and wealthiest of all the Comanche bands, had been mostly wiped out.

Oil was what mattered. The Allies had burned seven billion barrels during the war; 90 percent of that had come from America, mostly from Texas. The Big Inch and Little Big Inch: they could not have invaded Normandy without them. The Allies had sailed to victory on a sea of Texas oil.

The settlers had pushed far beyond Belknap, Chadbourne, and Phantom Hill, a hundred miles past where the army could protect them.