Joseph Trevino

Spouse of Florence Proctor Bartlett, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Joseph Trevino was born in 1874 in San Antonio, Texas, and lived sixty-two years as a cattle drover, first on the old roads to the Kansas railheads and later on the short hauls between the ranches of the south Texas brush and the stock pens of his home town. He belonged to no slayer house and was never a hunter. In 1898 he married the seamstress Florence Proctor Bartlett of the White Ledger line, and their one child was William Trevino, born in 1899 and dead in 1977, who did not hunt either. Joseph died in 1936 of a stroke, aged sixty-two, in the yard of the pens he had worked for thirty years. The Proctors keep him in the family papers as a husband who came in by marriage and stayed, and remember him as the man who could tell, by the way a herd was standing, that something had passed through it in the night. He never once said so. He said that the cattle seemed unsettled, and that it was as well to move them before dark. San Antonio in 1874 was a Tejano town that was turning, at some speed, into a cattle town. His father, a Tejano teamster who hauled hides and freight between the city and the coast, lived on the south side near the old mission road, in a house with a cistern and a mesquite tree, and his mother kept chickens, sold tamales at the market plaza and raised four children on the proceeds. Joseph was the third. He was a lean, dark, quiet boy with a long stride and a habit of watching the sky, and he was at the stockyards at ten, holding horses for the drovers at a nickel a day. He learned early that a horse will tell you everything if you stand still and wait. By fourteen he was riding drag, which is the worst place in a herd, at the back in the dust, and he said later that it had taught him a patient temper and the colour of every kind of dirt. The great trail years were ending as he came into them. The Kansas railheads had been closed to Texas cattle by quarantine laws, the railway had reached the ranch country, and the long drives of his father's generation were giving way to the short ones. He drove, in the nineties, from the brush country around Cotulla and Pearsall to the pens at San Antonio and on to the railhead, eighty or a hundred miles at a stretch, with a crew of six and a wagon. It was hard work, but it was regular, and it suited a man who liked the same road twice. He knew the water on every mile of it, and the ranch kitchens that would feed a drover and the ones that would not, and he knew the nights when the cattle would not bed down, and did not press them. He met Florence Proctor Bartlett at the depot. It was in the spring of 1897, when he went up to the freight office on Commerce Street to book a string of stock cars, and found, at the desk behind the counter, a clerk with a very exact hand who was arranging the paperwork for the railway agent. The clerk was Frederick Bartlett, a man of forty-seven with spectacles, who looked over the booking and found three errors in it, and sent for his daughter to check the tally. She was twenty, small, dark and rather pale, with a seamstress's pricked fingers, and she was helping her father that day because the regular boy was ill. She corrected the count of steers, not with a pencil but with a needle, which she had stuck through the page. He said that he had not been so neatly outdone since he was nine. She said that she hoped he would book the cars again. He booked them every week for a year. He also, in the evenings, walked her back to her mother's shop on Commerce Street, which stood on the route between the depot and the river, and he stood in the shop door and looked at the bolts of cloth. Her mother, Lydia Oppenheimer Proctor, a small, steel-spectacled woman who listened to everyone, looked him over across the counter for a full month and asked him, in the end, three questions about his people and one about his horse. He answered them all. The horse, she said, was the only reference she needed. They were married in 1898, in the spring, at the German Methodist church, where the bride's father gave her away in a borrowed coat, and the groom's mother, who was a Catholic and very devout, stood at the back with a rosary and sang the Methodist hymns in Spanish, with great feeling. He was told what the Proctors did on the second night of the honeymoon, in a hotel in New Braunfels, by his wife, who said she could not start a marriage with a thing unsaid. She told him about the Ledger, the feud and the creature called the Guest in the same even voice in which she might have told him where the thread was kept. He said that his grandmother, on the south side, had always kept a bowl of salt at the door, and had never explained it, and that he had supposed it was for the cat. She laughed so much she had to sit on the bed. After that he knew, without being told, what to do. He was a drover, and a drover's part in the work was to be a man who went where the hunters could not, along the ranch roads, who noticed a dead calf with no blood in it, and who said so to his wife. Their son William Trevino was born in 1899, in the spring, at Victoria, where his mother had gone down with Joseph's herd, and was brought home to the rooms above the shop within the fortnight, and lived until 1977. He was a solid, cheerful, bookish child who was not called to the work and was not sorry, and his father taught him to ride, to tie a knot that would hold a steer and to read a sky. The boy went into the trades first, and came back to the drive after his grandmother's death. He went into the trades, as his biography says, and was a steady figure in the life of the family for seventy-eight years. Joseph was a gentle father, and he was proud of his son. He took the boy on short drives in the summers, and let him ride the lead steer into the pens, and sang, on the long road home, in a thin, true baritone, a repertoire of corridos that included every verse that could not be repeated at church. The great storm that struck Galveston in September 1900 was a matter of freight as well as tragedy. He was in the pens at San Antonio when the first relief trains came in with the refugees, and he was among the drovers who were sent, at a day's notice, with a string of wagons and horses to the railhead to carry the survivors to the boarding houses and the churches. His wife's mother, at the shop, and his wife's cousin by marriage, Emma Adams, who kept a boarding house on Alamo Street, took in a score of them. He brought in seven himself, in the wagon, among them a silent old man who would not eat, and was delivered, later that night, into the custody of a Ledger cousin. The matter was handled. He never asked how. The Great War came to his door as beef. The cantonment at Camp Travis and the flying field at Kelly needed cattle by the thousand, and he drove them, at the age of forty-three, with a crew of boys and pensioners, from the brush to the army's pens, and was paid in contracts that were honoured, which was better than most. The influenza that followed, in the autumn of 1918, killed two of his crew and a good many of his neighbours on the south side. It did not touch his family, which his mother-in-law attributed to the salt. He buried his crew, paid their wages to their widows and went back to work. A man who has driven cattle in a blizzard, he said, has no use for panic. Florence died in 1921, when their son was twenty-two, of what the family book calls old age, though she was only forty-four, and he was a widower for fifteen years. He did not remarry. He kept the house on the south side, worked the pens, and ate Sunday dinner, every week, at the table of his wife's mother, Lydia, until her death in 1923, and afterwards at his son's. He had his stroke on a warm afternoon in the summer of 1936, leaning on a rail, looking at a pen of steers that had suddenly gone quiet. The men who reached him found that he had been watching them for some time. He was sixty-two. They closed the pens for the afternoon, which had never been done, and the steers, it was remembered, stood still. Joseph Trevino is remembered in the Proctor family as the drover who married into the White Ledger and kept its roads open without ever being told why. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ranch hands and trail men who carried the work on their backs from pen to pen, who read the cattle for the things the hunters were looking for, and who never asked the family to call it anything but a good day's drive.