Texas

Texas is the destination that redirects Lizzy Enders’s father from Colorado and eventually offers Lizzy and Elena the prospect of a shared home with him. In the story, the state first appears through the scale and profits of cattle ranching; later, the Santa Gertrudis Ranch gives that commercial promise a domestic shape, with a house, a school, and a way for Lizzy to bring Elena with her.

A Destination Made by Ranching

At the outset of his journey along the Gila Trail, Lizzy’s father is heading toward Colorado. A drover he meets has just returned from taking a herd north to the Plains and tells him that King, owner of the Santa Gertrudis Ranch in Texas, needs capable workers. Lizzy’s father has run a plantation before the war, and the prospect of well-paid ranch work makes him change course and set out for Texas. The change is immediate: Texas becomes not an inherited plan but an opportunity opened by a conversation about labor and cattle.

The opportunity is defined in unusually concrete terms. The ranch is described as the biggest in the Southwest, and King owns six hundred thousand acres. Texas is sending millions of cattle to eastern markets; the ranch needs a foreman to hire and supervise responsible men who can drive about five thousand market-ready steers to Kansas. Lizzy’s father estimates that the position could earn him more than five thousand dollars a year. His letter presents Texas through acreage, herds, wages, and market routes, a landscape organized around the movement of cattle and the management of men. Lizzy recognizes the motive plainly: her father’s plans are about money, profits, and the cattle market.

The Ranch as a Possible Home

The scale of that enterprise shapes Lizzy’s uncertainty about what a future with her father would mean. In her letter, she wonders what his duties will be and whether he will remain at the ranch or spend his time on cattle drives. She imagines him among drovers roping cows, asks herself whether he still refuses to fire a gun, and considers whether veterans from either side of the war would take orders from him. These questions leave the ranch partly unknown to her: it is a place of work whose routines and social world she can only try to picture.

Lizzy also treats Texas as a test of her father’s intentions. She hopes the ranch will be a new beginning for him after his unhappiness in Independence, but she asks him to be explicit if he truly wants her to come and live with him after her education. She offers to bring Ben and imagines inviting Cassie the following summer, yet insists that she will not make the move merely to spare her father from seeming unkind. If he cannot make up his mind, she says, she will go first to Uncle William. Her hope is qualified by the fear that ranch work will keep her father away on cattle drives and that his invitation may not mean he genuinely wants her there.

A Refuge for Lizzy and Elena

Texas acquires a more urgent significance when Elinora St. Clair explains Lizzy’s circumstances to Bishop Lamy. She presents Lizzy’s father as about to become a foreman at one of the Southwest’s largest ranches and says that Lizzy will be able to live with him there, with permission. The ranch is proposed as a place where Elena can grow up in health and love; remaining in New Mexico, Elinora warns, would leave the child vulnerable to Ramon Baca finding her. Texas therefore stands not only for employment and reunion but also for distance from a danger that threatens Elena.

The letter from Lizzy’s father identifies the ranch as the Santa Gertrudis Ranch, while Elinora’s account describes the foreman’s position as forthcoming. By the time Lizzy leaves the convent, the situation has become more settled: her father is an important manager at the ranch, where he has an adobe house with a courtyard. A Methodist circuit rider comes once a month, and the ranch has a school for the children who live there. These details answer, in part, the questions Lizzy had posed about what life in Texas might offer. The place is still a working cattle enterprise, but it also has a household, religious services, and schooling, the elements that make a life there imaginable for a girl and a baby.

The Journey Toward Texas

Four months after the convent episode, the new Santa Fe Railroad has reached the plains of New Mexico to within sixty-five miles of Santa Fe, but Lizzy is not traveling toward it. She is going to Texas. Bishop Lamy arranges the journey, and Teresa Espinosa, Elena’s wet nurse, travels with her, as do Teresa’s husband, Georgio, and their baby. Abeyta’s father supplies an escort of six expert riflemen and scouts; the party has three wagons. The scale of the arrangements reflects the stakes of bringing Elena safely to the ranch.

On the April morning of departure, Abeyta and Elinora stand hand in hand as Lizzy prepares to climb onto Ben’s back; Elena is already asleep in the rear of a wagon. The scene marks Texas as the direction toward which the story’s separate hopes and necessities now converge. Lizzy is leaving the convent not simply for her father’s employment, but for the possibility of joining his household and taking Elena somewhere the child can be protected and raised.