For seven days the man known as the Lone Truther rode Coronado’s ghost trails, up out of the Sonoran Desert and across the Chihuahuan Desert. For seven days he heard no sound but the creaking of his saddle and Silver’s steady clip-clop, clip-clop, on the sun-baked earth. For seven days he avoided sky-lining himself, watching always for the tell-tale puff of dust in the distance or the talking-smoke that would tell him the Apaches had seen him.
The only things the Lone Truther knew about the Apaches was what he read in the Louis L’Amour books. Which meant that he knew they were the world’s greatest guerilla fighters and that they could hide where no other man could hide. Tonto had warned him about this ride; told him that an Apache could kill you so fast you wouldn’t even know you were dead. But he and Tonto were only fictional characters, invented in a time of stereotyping Native Americans, so what did he know really?
He wished Tonto had come along, but when he told Tonto of the cry for help from his old friends, the Wheathorns in Kansas, Tonto had wanted to know exactly what is was that the Wheathorns needed saving from.
“They’re surrounded, Tonto!”
“By whom are they surrounded, Kemo Sabe?”
“Illegal immigrants!”
“In Kansas?” asked Tonto, incredulously.
“Yes, Tonto!”
“Kemo Sabe, stop using exclamation points. You know I can’t stand that. And I refuse to believe there are enough illegal immigrants in all of Kansas to surround anybody. You go by yourself.”
And so the Lone Truther had ridden out alone. He had no choice. He had known the Wheathorns since he was a little boy and he loved them as much as he loved his own family. They were family to him. He would have ridden across all the deserts of the world to answer their call.
Deporting Bisbee Miners
He knew the history of the Mexican immigrants well. Born and raised in America’s Southwest, all land taken from Mexico at the point of a gun in 1848 — in a war Abraham Lincoln had opposed — the Lone Truther knew that the United States alternated between exploiting cheap Mexican labor when it was needed and deporting the Mexican workers when it was not. Between 1850 and 1888 55,000 field hands and more than 60% of the workers in Southwestern mines and railroads were from Mexico. Mexican labor was the fuel — the inexpensive fuel – that drove the agricultural revolution in the American West between 1900 and 1920.
Besides, Americans were always getting themselves involved in wars. While the young people were off fighting and dying, capitalism needed more labor and it was always right there, just south of the border. Then, when the war was over, and the remaining young people returned and needed jobs, the country devised ways of getting rid of the Mexican workers. In the aftermath of World War One, the United States even created the Border Patrol to keep new laborers out of the country and to find and escort out the invited ones already in the country. Then came the Great Depression and the clamor to get rid of that cheap labor pool was loud, long, and ugly. But then World War II arrived and all that labor was needed again and back came the Mexican laborers. A recession followed the Korean War and out they went again. By the time 21st Century arrived, the country was in yet another recession and it was time to get rid of the workers again. Economic boom and bust; get them in, get them out. The cycle was depressingly predictable.
It was true that the 12 million or so Mexican workers; all those motel maids, meat packers, and yard workers doing work that no U.S. citizen wanted their children to do, had broken one law — working in the U.S. without a Green Card — but they had not broken another, bigger law: The law of supply and demand.
Still, if they had surrounded his friends in Kansas, the Lone Truther would deal with them. With his six-shooter if necessary. He didn’t know exactly what he would do if there were more than six. Maybe they’d give him time to reload.
But when he got there at the end of his long ride, the farmhouse was placid and all was well. Sheriffs Earp, Arpeggio, and Johnson had gotten there first, rousted the immigrants, and Kansas was safe again. The Lone Truther stayed for a couple of days, helping with the undone yard work, meat packing, and motel cleaning, but then it was time to go west again. Born under a wandering star, he had to go back to where they called the wind Maria.
As he rode off into the sunset, the Lone Truther missed Tonto. He wanted him by his side when he rode out of Kansas and into Oklahoma so he could say, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Tonto.”
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For more on the economic development of the American West, the Lone Truther recommends a survey by one of his college professors, Gerald D. Nash, The Federal Landscape: An Economic History of the Twentieth-Century West. You can buy it from the University of Arizona Press at this link.
Tags: American West, Deportees, illegal immigration, Kansas, Lone Truther, U.S. History
