Lone Star

by T. R. Fehrenbach

  The bleak and unlettered view of God and God's earth, the stark and impoverished cultural tradition, the burning interest in what men do, or own, but not what they are, or might be—the motion, the pursuit, the ceaseless imperialism of the pragmatic mind—what American could deny these? All had a deep root in the English-speaking world, above all in America. Texas, from Stephen Austin to Sam Houston to L. H. McNelly to Lyndon Johnson, was only a boldly drawn example of Anglo-Saxon society, showing what any English-speaking community would do, under similar conditions. Between frontier Australia and frontier Texas there was an affinity that almost amounted to brotherhood: Down Under was one place Texans went to stay. A Texan became the most popular American ambassador to Australia that country has had. There was an essential vulgarity and violence in both souls.

  If the Texan was little worried about what he was, and must obscure all thought in action, resting his case for greatness on great works, good or bad, most Americans were the same. If Lyndon Johnson chose to stand or fall on what he did in the vitally evil arena of public action, he would stand higher among Americans in many things than other men who chose to conceptualize and talk.

  If Texans were man-centered, and to them the earth was nothing if not to be exploited; if God was not a God who died upon a cross but a smiling uncle who accepted a junior partnership while suffering little children to eat candy on his knee, what American would not destroy a river, or demolish a hundred forests, or create a dust bowl, if doing it provided a thousand jobs? What American was not a wholly economic man?

  All Americans, in one way or another, had grasped their chosen land, out-Godded God, made a blaspheming, materialistic, burgeoning—and yet decent—society. They worked much kindness with their evils, much good with their gains. Texas was not a better place when the Comanches had it, killing Apaches with the torture and themselves barely living thirty violent, squalid, brutish years. Nor would the Spanish have erected a Garden of Eden, had their arms prevailed. The Spanish left enough evidence of that behind, in other places, other times.

  The Texan despised the Mexican. But the Mexican problem, the race's real problem, was one Texas did not invent. Never exposed to the frontier ethic, he moved doggedly into a society saturated with the beliefs that life's a fight, that man must get ahead, bend nature to his will, even if he must destroy nature in the process. The pelado came from a culture where no man for four hundred years gained anything by slaving harder for his master; where his gentle hope that God might yet provide was still alive. He was unequipped to step into the whirlwind, against which other-driven men cannot stand. He thought "just like a Meskin—work eight hours, then payday, and hit the beer halls"; he was, but he could not march across that bleak puritan landscape and become an entrepreneur. Men who exist get overrun by men who act.

  It was no different in San Antonio or New York.

  What was the great drive toward new playgrounds, clean streets, better housing, better schools, and more bloodless bureaucracy that gripped 20th-century Texas metropoles but part of a last outburst of the American frontier heresy, the Pelagianism that had such deep roots in the Anglo-Saxon soul? The efforts to forge a single society out of many pillars, to improve the race of man by educating his mind: these heresies gripped the Texan as surely as the American mind.

  He was an American, first and last.

  Those who tried to reject the Jacksonian advance to the West, the policies of James Polk, and the Sheridan-Grant solution to the Indian problem as American aberrations themselves committed aberrations by not seeing things, and themselves, as they really were.

  The history of Texas, and the people of Texas, were American history and American people, and in part, a part of the story of the world.

  As the raw scar of the frontier fades and the frontier values evaporate, as they must; as Texan society grudgingly grows genuinely metropolitan, as it mixes and amalgamates with fresh waves of human stock, patterns change. The people change, as they must change. The first settlers called themselves Texians, and their descendants, and all those who took part in the great conquest, are properly called Texans. There are already several million non-Texan residents of Texas, and their numbers must increase. In another hundred years, perhaps, the reality of the frontier will be as remote to Texas residents as the American frontier is to residents of Massachusetts, where not one in seven people is descended from stock that killed an Indian. The Anglo conquest of the American West will become a distant thing, perhaps to be despised, certainly to be misunderstood, even if admired. Already certain Texas chauvinisms are dying; Texans are revising their own mythology.

  That time is not quite yet. The office-working, car-driving Texan may soon be indistinguishable from his Northern counterpart, but something peculiarly Texan will still remain. The denizens of London, Paris, and Moscow do much the same kind of work, live much the same sort of lives in the modern age. However, no one would claim that they are the same. They have each been made different by the crucible of history, they think and act in different ways, according to the history that shaped their hearts and minds.

  Texas of course will change greatly, perhaps become unrecognizable to the people of today. However, the history of Texas and the Texans will surely remain.

  In the end, perhaps after all people, will be the land. It was stubborn soil, and it was difficult to destroy. Men tore it, gouged it, cut down its forest cover and plowed up its shielding grasses, yet most of it remained. The rivers were dammed, but they were still there. The seas of grass were cut by endless pasture fences, but the land itself, and the sweeping, rising, majestic plateaus were bedded in limestone too solid to remove. Nor would cities ever cover all of them, because when God made Texas, He made water scarce. Already, under the plateaus, the deep-driven wells were running dry. More plowed fields would shrink, more thick green-and-brown grass grow over the humus made by eons of bison bones. In many places, man had already begun a long retreat.

  Most places had little changed. On Palmito O. G. Jones could still plant his guns where no one lived, and sweep the Yankees back to Boca Chica. The thicket where Rip Ford sat his horse and sounded the charge was still there. A few miles away, a rusting cannon marked the lonely prairie where Taylor crashed into the Mexicans. Taylor, and Arista, would have recognized the ground. Through much of Texas, only the ubiquitous paved roads, and fences, and telephone and powerline poles had changed the surface of the land.

  The Coahuiltecs would have found their old hunting grounds as inhospitable as before. More cactus and mesquite grew on them, spread by the overgraze of cattle. But the brasada shimmered in the sun, much as it had for a thousand years.

  The old Comanche trace to Mexico, near Fort Clark, lay still ephemerally green under the Comanche moon. Blue gentians grew in the headwaters of the Brazos, as they grew to the sound of Kiowa flutes. The bones of men and buffalo were gone; the land took them, and remained.

  The vast stretches of the fraying limestone plateaus above the Balcones Scarp remained also; clear shallow streams playing over deep brown beds, the oaks standing ocher and solemn against the fading meadows after the first fall frost. Anywhere, across hundreds of leagues, the horizon rose clear against low hills for miles.

  This land shaped those who lived upon it more than they changed it. Hostile, yet with a beauty the second generation came to love, with crashing meteorological changes that punished man and beast, with winds that made them uneasy, yet volatile and free, it somehow aroused a sense of music in the Spanish-Mexican soul. In Americans, it made feelings they could not articulate.

  The land, the climate, the sense of endlessness yet constant change made all who came there hospitable, patriotic, violent, and brave. In the Indian it produced mysticism, as he wailed his death songs to the earth, the cold moon, and sun. In the Hispanic breast it made a communion with Nature, a poetry, a willingness to ride the broad vistas, pause under moss-hung oaks, and be.

  The Anglo had no eye for beauty, less feel for rock-ribbed soil. Yet t
he land was too big even for big men to develop and destroy. He fenced it, dammed it, threw his cattle over it in prodigal hordes; he farmed it, and in drouth and shattering hail and cold, cursed Nature and Nature's God. Yet all these acts were in their own way acts of love. The Anglo-Saxon laced this soil with his own and other men's blood; it would take his bones, and monstrous artifacts, and still remain.

  The sun would remain, while men must die. The moon would rise again, while civilizations fell. In the end would be the earth. Texas, under any name, would go on forever.

  Bibliographical Notes and Suggestions for Further Reading

  The most important sources of Texas history are found within the following broad categories, all of which I have drawn on heavily:

  GENERAL HISTORIES

  The best of the older books is Henderson K. Yoakum's History of Texas 1685–1846 (New York, 1856). Another standard in every Texas library is Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of the North Mexican States and Texas (2 vols., San Francisco, 1884–89). These contain excellent coverage of the French-Spanish periods and reflect American moral certainties of the 19th century. Dudley G. Wooten, A Comprehensive History of Texas (2 vols., Dallas, 1897) reproduces Yoakum's text with additions. John Henry Brown, A History of Texas, 1685–1892 (2 vols., St. Louis, 1892–93) and Frank White Johnson, History of Texas and Texans (Chicago, 1914) are compilations of men and events with contemporary views. Johnson's work, largely written by editors E. C. Barker and E. W. Winkler, is a superior history, published a generation after his death. Interesting, but of lesser value, are William Kennedy, Texas (London, 1841; Fort Worth, 1925), and David B. Edward, History of Texas (Cincinnati, 1836).

  Louis J. Wortham, A History of Texas (5 vols., Fort Worth, 1924) is very readable but lacks index and some accuracy in details. Clarence R. Wharton's Texas Under Many Flags (Chicago and New York, 1930) consists of two volumes of history and three of Texan biography. H. S. Thrall, Pictorial History of Texas (St. Louis, 1879) is also valuable for biographical sketches.

  General histories on the later periods of Texas history are few. Ralph Steen, edited by F. C. Adams, Texas Democracy (4 vols., Austin 1937) is primarily a political study; Steen's Twentieth Century Texas, An Economic and Social History (Austin, 1942) covers only the early decades. The most modern, and widely used, general history is Rupert Norval Richardson, Texas, The Lone Star State (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1943; rev. 1958).

  PERIODICAL LITERATURE

  There is widespread agreement that the best, and most useful, writings on Texas history have been published in the Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association (Vols. I–XVI, Austin, Texas, 1897–1912) and its successor, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, continuing from July 1912. These articles and monographs cover every field and period, and in innumerable cases each is the definitive work on the subject. Unfortunately, these gems of research and writing are scattered over the years and have reached too small an audience. Similar valuable Texas material is included in The Journal of Southern History (Lexington, Ky., quarterly since 1934), and the quarterly Mississippi Valley Historical Review, (Lincoln, Neb.) issued from 1914.

  Newspaper archives provide perhaps the best reflection of contemporary attitudes. Editorial writing in the 19th century was both a florid and a violent art and probably revealed genuine sentiments and ideology much more clearly than the bland dissertations of today. Newspapers, scattered about the state, also contain an enormous amount of historical trivia for the student inclined to search it out.

  The Texas Almanac, which first appeared in January 1857, and had a combined antebellum distribution of perhaps 100,000 copies, has been and is the single most valuable reference work on Texas. Suspended between 1873 and 1904 and published irregularly from 1904 through 1925, The Texas Almanac is now issued biennially by the Dallas Morning News. Of special interest to student, historian, and general reader is a compendium of the years 1857–73 published by the Texian Press (Waco, 1967), placing heretofore rare material in easy access.

  MANUSCRIPT AND OTHER PRIMARY SOURCES

  There is a trend among professional historians to seek out more and more original sources, producing a tremendous flow of antiquarian mosaic-fitting. Manuscript material, in several languages, is plentiful. The archives of Spain and Mexico are rich, but unfortunately not easily accessible even to on-site research by bilingual students. Like early Texas newspapers, manuscripts of the Spanish-Mexican period are highly colored, reflecting strong clerical or anticlerical bias. It is possible to explore material on the Texas missions, for example, which utterly ignores their secular situation and purpose. These must be balanced with the equally fervent—but often brilliant and incisive—reports of civil and military officers.

  The best (and certainly most accessible) Hispanic library on Texas is at the University of Texas at Austin. This, with the University of Oklahoma at Norman, is the richest repository of unpublished source material on the Southwest.

  Important source material on Texas in the German language has generally been translated into English and published in this country.

  One of the most heartening trends of recent years has been the continuing publication either of manuscript material or the reprinting or reissue in facsimile of old, and often quite rare, writings. These projects have been carried out by Texas publishers such as the University of Texas Press, Texian at Waco, Steck at Austin, and by the Rio Grande Press of Chicago and others; in this way an enormous amount of firsthand information has been made available not only to the student but also to the general reader and Texas history buff.

  Usually avoided, but clearly important for the serious student, are the several government archives. Those of Texas and the United States hold civil and military reports, data, and pertinent information available nowhere else. Not only for accuracy but also for enlightenment, official data may be compared against newspaper and other published accounts. U.S. Army records, for example, often contain facts and figures contemporary Texans ignored, such as the death rate from yellow fever on the coast.

  For the 20th century, the historian must use much fragmentary material. Subjects such as industrialization, agricultural revolutions, immigration, race relations, politics, and the like are rarely covered adequately in general accounts. Here specialized writings, in newspapers and periodicals (and ethnic periodicals, such as the League of United Latin American Citizens bulletins, as well) must be searched out; a clipping file is basic. Until the focus of Texan historical interest moves beyond the 19th century, students and historical researchers will have to draw heavily on scattered and specialized material and synthesize it through their own outlooks and experience.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  This list, from most of which I have drawn in some degree, by no means forms a complete bibliography. I have deliberately restricted it to recent works, books in print, or volumes easily found in good Texas libraries; and I have excluded the often definitive publications of the historical quarterlies, which are highly specialized and scattered. This selection does offer an enormous insight into the Texas past, and should provide any serious reader with more material than he can easily exhaust.

  PART I. COMANCHES AND THE KING'S MERCIES

  The land of Texas is well laid out in Frederic W. Simonds's The Geography of Texas (Boston, 1914), a standard. The Natural Regions of Texas (University of Texas Bulletin 3113, Austin, 1931) clarifies the sharp differences between east and west. Roy Bedicheck, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist (Garden City, N.Y., 1947; Austin, 1966) remains a popular and interesting book.

  The best archeological reference on Texas is contained in Dee Ann Suhm and A. D. Krieger, An Introductory Handbook of Texas Archeology, published by the Texas Archeological Society, Austin, 1954. E. H. Sellards, Early Man in America: A Study in Prehistory (Austin, 1952); H. M. Wormington, Ancient Man in North America (rev., Denver, 1957); and Fred Wendorf, A. D. Krieger, Claude C. Albritton, and T. D. Stewart, The Midland Discovery (Austin, 1955) reveal some of the
excitement and controversies concerning the mysterious first settlers.

  There are countless books on Amerinds: Clark Wissler's Indians of the United States (Garden City, N.Y. 1940, 1966); Mary Jourdan Atkinson's Indians of the Southwest (rev., San Antonio, 1963), also general; the best one-stop source is W. W. Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas (Austin, 1961). The Comanches are thoroughly explored in E. A. Hoebel, Comanches, Lords of the South Plains (Norman, Okla., 1952). The industrious will find useful the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin No. 30 (2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1907, 1910).

  The early European explorations of Texas are well covered in Paul I. Wellman's narrative history of the Southwest, Glory, God, and Gold (Garden City, N. Y., 1954), Bancroft's history (cited under "General Histories," above), and Herbert E. Bolton, Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542–1706 (New York, 1925). Because of the glamour that attended these searches for glory and gold, an enormous literature exists.

  Spanish Texas is comprehensively covered by Carlos Eduardo Castañeda, Our Catholic Heritage in Texas (6 vols., Austin, 1936–50). Castañeda also translated Fray Juan Agustín Morfi's History of Texas, 1673–1779 (2 vols., Quivira Society, Albuquerque, 1935); this, with Charles W. Hackett's edition of Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of Louisiana and Texas (3 vols., Austin, 1931, 1934, 1941), opens a mine of Spanish information. For a thorough treatment of all aspects of the time, see Herbert E. Bolton's scholarly but superb works, Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 1915) and Athanase de Mezières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier 1768–1780 (Cleveland, 1914). Walter P. Webb, The Great Plains (Boston, 1931) and Max L. Moorhead, The Apache Frontier (Norman, 1968) throw light on the Spanish Indian Problem.