The Harness Maker's Dream: Nathan Kallison and the Rise of South Texas

Four: The Land

Et FOUR The Land I= ROM HIS FIRST DAYS in San Antonio, Nathan was curious to see the countryside surrounding the city, the land on which his customers lived and worked. Cowboys wearing dusty broad-brimmed hats, boots, and spurs rode into town to hitch their horses in front of his shop. He learned the rhythms of their strange accents-so different from Chicago English-and he asked them how far they had ridden with a broken harness for him to mend or an old, worn saddle to trade in. He would ask the same of the ranch owners, whose hats of fine felt were less dusty as they dressed for an evening in the city. They came to inspect the quality of his saddles and compare prices with other leather crafters. He imagined how his store and a ranch could work in tandem to help his customers and grow his business. Whenever he could, Nathan would ride out on the roads around San Antonio, some of them just trails. A bespectacled man on a tall horse, he'd venture outside the city on a Sunday to watch cattle graze on the wide pastures. There were big ranches as well as many small, fenced-in farms with a cow or two and chickens in the yard, and a barn sturdier than the house appeared to be. Later, after Nathan's shop became a store and he had bought his first automobile, he drove further. He saw farms and ranches with cattle, sheep, goats, crops ofvegetables, corn, hay, and cotton. Past the flat ranch and farm land, he drove north and west to what was sometimes called the "Hill Country," exploring the rising terrain-hillsides of live oak trees and craggy boulders-and stopping to look at deer and jackrabbits. 55 THE HARNESS MAKER'S DREAM In these South Texas lands, he saw hardworking people making a life for themselves. He wanted to learn how they lived and workedand what they needed that he could supply. Foremost in his mind and his imagination was the fact that in America, in Southwest Texas, even people of little means could own farm and ranch land. Nathan Kallison, formerly of Ladyzhinka, Ukraine, was determined to own a ranch. In Russia, the thousands of acres of fertile farmland surrounding his village had been dominated for centuries by feudal landlords. They had been empowered by the czars to rule over both the land and the serfs who toiled there. Even after Alexander II freed the serfs from bondage and permitted them to own land in 1861, Jews still were denied that right. It was not just the romance of becoming a rancher that drove Nathan's vision, however. In Chicago and the eastern cities where most of the nineteenthand early twentieth-century immigrants had clustered, Jews, for the most part, aspired to become merchants or bankers, scholars and professional men (lawyers or doctors), with some eventually becoming wealthy philanthropists. Ranching, with its cowboy life, did not enter the picture. But in Texas, Nathan became entranced by the stories of successful Jewish ranchers. Although the mythology of the early West contains few stories about Jewish cowboys or ranchers, they played significant roles in the history of Texas ranching. Charles Weil, born in Alsace, France, arrived in Corpus Christi in 1867 and founded the Cross Six Ranch, which stretched over forty thousand acres in South Texas.' Another pioneer, A. Levytanksy, a Lithuanian, came as a jeweler to Luling in Southwest Texas and developed ranches that sprawled over parts of Dimmitt and LaSalle Counties. And the Halffbrothers-San Antonio merchants and founders of the Alamo National Bank, who immigrated to Texas from Alsace in the 1850s-built a Texas ranching empire encompassing more than six million acres. Although linking a livelihood to the land was risky, Nathan believed what Mayer Halff famously declared more than a quarter-century before-that success THE LAND could come to any person in San Antonio who "believed in the 'gospel of work' and whose soul is in the struggle.'" And as Nathan searched for ranch property for sale, he couldn't help but recall his mother's words: "Buy land and hold on to it. Someday it will feed your family." His instincts told him in 1910 that the time had come to buy land. Nathan Kallison had worked hard and lived frugally, always saving and planning for a future in...