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MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SERIES
GENERAL EDITOR
THOMAS G. PATERSON
Major Problems in
Texas History
Documents and Essays
SECOND EDITION
EDITED BY
SAM W. HAYNES
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON
CARY D. WINTZ
TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY
Australia • Brazil • Mexico • Singapore • United Kingdom • United States
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To Adrian S. Haynes, Ethan David Wintz, and Alexander De Cordova Wintz,
a new generation of Texans
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Contents
PREFAC E xi x
A B O U T TH E A U T H O R S xxiii
Chapter 1 Enduring Myths and the Land 1

ESSAYS 2
Walter L. Buenger • Texas and the South 3
Glen Sample Ely • Texas: Where the West Begins 9
Light Townsend Cummins • The Rebranding of Texas During
the 1936 Centennial 15
FURTHER READING 23
Chapter 2 Contested Empires: The Native Americans of

Texas and European Contact 25
DOCUMENTS 26
1. Cabeza de Vaca Encounters the Indians of Texas, 1535 27
2. Pedro Castañeda Explores the High Plains, 1540–1541 29
3. A Caddo War Party Returns Home, 1687 31
4. Spain Reacts to the French Presence in Texas, 1689 33
5. A Franciscan Reports on Prospects for Converting the
Caddo Indians, 1691 36
6. Caddo Indians Welcome the Domingo Ramón Expedition,
1716 39
ESSAYS 40
David La Vere • The Caddo Chiefdoms of Texas 41
ix
x CONTENTS
Juliana Barr • An Indian Language of Politics in the Land of the

Tejas 46
FURTHER READING 53
Chapter 3 The Challenges of Spanish Colonization: Struggles

and Accommodation in the Eighteenth
Century 55
DOCUMENTS 56
1. The Canary Islanders State Their Grievances to the Viceroy,
1741 57
2. Father Benito Fernández Refutes the Canary Islanders’
Complaints, 1741 58
3. Father Gaspar José de Solís Praises Indian Productivity
at the San José Mission, 1768 60
4. Father Miguel de Molina Describes the Attack on the San Sabá
Mission, 1758 62
5. Retrenchment in the Borderlands: The Rubí Dictamen of
April 10, 1768 66
6. Father José Francisco Lopez Advocates Secularizing the Missions
in San Antonio, 1792 68
ESSAYS 70
Gilberto M. Hinojosa • Self-Sufficiency and the San Antonio
Missions 71
Jesús F. de la Teja • The Making of a Tejano Community 80
FURTHER READING 86
Chapter 4 Populating Texas During the Mexican Era,

1821–1835 87
DOCUMENTS 88
1. The Coahuila y Texas Immigration Law, 1825 89
2. Caroline von Hinueber Describes the Hardships
of Life in Austin’s Colony, 1832 93
3. The Fredonian Rebels State Their Reasons for Insurrection
Against Mexico, 1826 95
4. Mier y Terán Fears Mexico May Lose Texas, 1830 97
5. Mexico Seeks to Block Anglo-American Immigration: The
April 6, 1830 Law 99
6. The San Antonio Ayuntamiento Petitions the Mexican
Government for a Liberal Immigration Policy, 1832 100
CONTENTS xi
7. Stephen F. Austin Explains the Reasons for His Arrest by

Mexican Authorities, 1834 103
ESSAYS 106
Raúl Ramos • Tejano Leaders Develop a Borderland Identity 106
Gregg Cantrell • Stephen F. Austin: Political and Cultural
Mediator 112
FURTHER READING 119
Chapter 5 Rebellion in Texas, 1835–1836 121

DOCUMENTS 122
1. Map of Texas on the Eve of Rebellion, 1835 123
2. Branch T. Archer Addresses the Consultation, November 3,
1835 123
3. John Sowers Brooks Joins the Fight for Texas Independence,
1835 125
4. Alamo Commander William B. Travis Appeals for Aid,
February 24, 1836 126
5. Eulalia Yorba Remembers the Fall of the Alamo,
March 6, 1836 127
6. Texas Declaration of Independence, March 2, 1836 128
7. Mexico’s Secretary of War José Maria Tornel Rebuts the Texan
Reasons for Independence, 1836 131
8. Mrs. Dilue Harris Recounts the “Runaway Scrape,” March
1836 133
9. American Abolitionist Benjamin Lundy Sees a Southern Slave
Conspiracy, 1836 134
ESSAYS 135
David J. Weber • Refighting the Alamo: Mythmaking and the
Texas Revolution 136
Sam W. Haynes • The Impact of the American Revolution on the
Texas Rebellion 143
FURTHER READING 150
Chapter 6 From Fragile Republic to Statehood 152

DOCUMENTS 153
1. Anglo-Texans Commemorate Their Independence, 1839 155
2. An Anonymous Visitor Describes Land Speculation in Houston
City, 1837 156
3. City of Houston, as Imagined by a European Artist 159
xii CONTENTS
4. Mirabeau Lamar Threatens War Against the Cherokees,

1839 159
5. Chief Colita Opposes Lamar’s Indian Policy, 1839 162
6. Mary Maverick Describes the Council House Fight Between
Comanches and San Antonio Residents, 1840 162
7. Germans Establish Strong Ties with the Indians of Central
Texas, 1846 165
8. Juan Seguín Flees to Mexico After the Vásquez Invasion,
1842 168
9. The United States Annexes Texas, March 1845 172
10. Entrepreneurs Richard King and Mifflin Kenedy Build a
Mercantile and Cattle Empire, 1850 173
ESSAYS 175
Stephen L. Hardin • Houston City: “The Most Miserable Place in
the World” 176
F. Todd Smith • Mirabeau Lamar’s Policy Towards the Indians
of East Texas 181
Andrés Tijerina • The Trans-Nueces in Conflict 186
FURTHER READING 193
Chapter 7 Changing Gender Roles on the Texas

Frontier 195
DOCUMENTS 196
1. Francis Lubbock Joins the Militia, 1838 197
2. William S. Fisher Defends His Conduct After the Texan Defeat
at Mier, 1843 199
3. Sam Houston Writes to His Wife Margaret, 1854 201
4. Helen Chapman Describes Life in Brownsville, 1849 203
5. Elizabeth Scott Neblett Reflects Upon Married Life,
1852–1860 205
6. Ferdinand Roemer Attends a San Antonio Fandango, 1846 207
7. Betty Powers Recalls Her Life as a Slave, n.d. 209
ESSAYS 209
Jimmy L. Bryan • Anglo-Texan Adventurism and Manliness 210
Angela Boswell • Women in Antebellum Texas 215
Jane Dysart • Mexican Women and the Process of Cultural
Assimilation 220
FURTHER READING 224
CONTENTS xiii
Chapter 8 Slavery, Secession and Civil War, 1861–1865 225

DOCUMENTS 225
1. Charles William Tait’s Plantations Rules, n.d. 227
2. Frederick Law Olmsted Reports on Runaway Slaves,
1857 228
3. Fears of Slave Revolts Grip North Texas, 1860 229
4. Texans State Their Reasons for Secession, 1861 231
5. Sam Houston Opposes Secession, 1861 233
6. Andy J. Anderson, Former Slave, Recalls Life During the
Civil War, n.d. 236
7. Rebecca Ann Adams Writes to Her Husband About Life
on the Home Front, 1863 237
ESSAYS 239
Randolph B. Campbell • A Southern Slave Empire 240
Sean M. Kelley • A Slaveholding Borderland 245
Walter L. Buenger • The Roots of Texas Secession 250
FURTHER READING 257
Chapter 9 Race, Politics, and Reconstruction,

1865–1875 259
DOCUMENTS 260
1. General Gordon Granger Frees All Texas Slaves, June 19,
1865 261
2. Three Slaves Remember Emancipation (1865),
1937–1938 261
3. Confederate Unionist John H. Reagan Advocates Civil and
Political Rights for Blacks, 1865 263
4. Republican Newspaper Editor John L. Haynes Berates the
Democrats for Failure to Protect Freedman, 1867 265
5. Freedmen’s Bureau Agents Report on the Status of Freedmen,
1867 267
6. An “Unreconstructed” Rebel Laments His Cause [poem],
c. 1865 269
7. White Southerner Martin M. Kenney Describes Reconstruction
in Austin County, n.d. 270
8. African American Platform Expresses Concerns About the End
of Republican Rule, 1873 271
xiv CONTENTS
ESSAYS 272
Barry A. Crouch • White Violence in Reconstruction Texas 273
Carl H. Moneyhon • George T. Ruby and African American
Politics During Reconstruction 279
Thad Sitton • Freedom Colonies in Post-Reconstruction
Texas 285
FURTHER READING 291
Chapter 10 Conquering and Populating the Frontiers,

1860–1920 292
DOCUMENTS 293
1. Hugh Harmon McElvy, a Georgia Farmer, Reports on
the Hardships Farmers Faced on the Texas Frontier, 1871 294
2. Army Wife Emily K. Andrews Gives a Woman’s View of the
Texas Frontier, 1874 295
3. Will Crittenden, an African American Cowboy, Describes Life
on the Range, 1870s–1880s 298
4. Elario Cardova, a Mexican American Cowboy,
Remembers Working as a Ranch Hand in South Texas,
1870s–1880s 299
5. Ms. Ben Miskimon, a Woman on the Range, Recounts Her
Experiences Running the Family Cattle Business in Texas,
1874 300
6. The New York Times Reports Indian Raids on White
Settlements, 1874 301
7. Captain George Wythe Baylor, Texas Ranger, Gives a Stark
Account of the Last Battle Between the Apache and the Rangers,
1880 303
8. The Washington Post Describes Conflict on the Texas-Mexican
Border, 1915 306
9. The Pershing Punitive Expedition, 1916 307
ESSAYS 309
Terry G. Jordan • The Emergence of the Texas Cattle
Industry 309
Arnoldo De Léon • Race and the Frontier in Texas and the
Southwest 316
James N. Leiker • The Texas-Mexico Border Crisis of the
1910s 322
FURTHER READING 328
CONTENTS xv
Chapter 11 Suffrage and Beyond: Texas Women and Reform,

1885–1925 330
DOCUMENTS 331
1. Texas Pioneer Ann Other Describes Women’s Political Interests
in the Farmer’s Revolt, 1888 332
2. Tyler Women’s Club Presents the Virtues of the Club in a
Poem from The Club Monthly, 1897 333
3. Newspaper Columnist Pauline Periwinkle Celebrates
Transforming Social Clubs into Civic Reform Organizations,
1904 334
4. Mrs. R. W. Simpson, Chairman of the Texas General
Federation of Women’s Clubs, Presents the Federation’s
Environmental Agenda, 1914 335
5. Texas Suffrage Organizer Jane Y. McCallum Describes the
Impeachment Rally Against James Ferguson, July 28, 1917 337
6. Mrs. Percy V. Pennybacker, Texas Suffrage Organizer, Writes
About Political Implications of Losing the Suffrage Amendment in
Congress, 1918 338
7. Suffragist Minnie Fisher Cunningham Begins Planning Political
Activity in Texas in the Post-Suffrage Era, 1918 339
ESSAYS 340
Marion K. Barthelme • Texas Women and the Farmers’
Alliance 341
Betty T. Chapman • Women’s Clubs as Vehicles for Reform in
Houston, 1885–1918 350
FURTHER READING 358
Chapter 12 Oil, Industrialization, and Urbanization,

1900–1940 360
DOCUMENTS 361
1. The Dallas Morning News Reports a Big Oil Discovery at
Spindletop, January 11, 1901 362
2. Oil Worker Al Hamill Gives an Eyewitness Account of the
Spindletop Gusher, 1901 363
3. The Dallas Morning News Praises Urban Planning for the City of
Dallas, 1910 364
4. Boston City Planner Arthur Comey Presents a Plan for the
Development of Houston, 1913 365
5. The Houston Post Reports the Mutiny of African American
Troops, 1917 367
xvi CONTENTS
6. Texans Tell Reporter Edward T. Devine That Some of “the

Best People” Belong to the Klan, 1922 370
7. African American Activist Clifford Richardson Assesses the
Needs of Black Neighborhoods in Houston, 1928 371
8. Humble Oil Vice President John Suman Relates Prosperity in
Houston to the Growth of the Texas Oil Industry, 1940 373
ESSAYS 375
Michelle M. Mears • City Planning and the Decline of Austin’s
Historic African American Communities 376
Robert B. Fairbanks • Boosterism, Reform, and Planning in Dallas
in the 1920s and 1930s 382
FURTHER READING 389
Chapter 13 Defining Mexican-American Identity in Texas,

1910–1950 391
DOCUMENTS 392
1. Mexican-American Nationalists Call for a Separate Republic in
the Southwest, 1915 393
2. Map Depicting Killings of Americans in Northern Mexico and
South Texas and New Mexico, 1910–1919 394
3. The U.S. Military Responds to Border Violence in South
Texas, 1915–1916 395
4. The League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC) States Its
Objectives, Goals, and Code, 1932, 1933 396
5. The Chapultepec Club, a Mexican American Women’s Club in
Houston, Lists Complaints Concerning Treatment of Minorities,
1937 399
6. Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks, Officers of the Texas
Communist Party, Outline Their Vision for Mexican Unification,
1939 400
7. Poet Américo Paredes Manzano Laments the Oppression of the
Mexico-Texan, 1939 402
8. The Constitution of the American G.I. Forum of Texas Seeks
Equal Rights for Mexican Americans in the Post-World War II
Era, 1949 402
ESSAYS 403
Neil Foley • “The Little Brown Man in Gringo Land:” Race and
Labor in Early Twentieth Century South Texas 403
CONTENTS xvii
Mario T. García • LULAC, Mexican American Identity, and Civil

Rights 410
FURTHER READING 419
Chapter 14 The African American Struggle for Civil Rights in

Texas, 1940–1970 420
DOCUMENTS 421
1. Smith v. Allwright Declares the White Primary Unconstitutional,
April 3, 1944 421
2. Broadside Documents Political Action of African Americans
After Defeat of the White Primary, 1948 423
3. The Founding of Texas Southern University Affirms “Separate
But Equal” Education, 1947 424
4. The Supreme Court Rules Separate Education Is Unequal in
Sweatt v. Painter, April 4, 1950 425
5. An Unidentified Investigator Gathers Intelligence on
Desegregation Activities in El Paso, 1955 426
6. The Texas Citizens’ Council of Houston Describes Links
Between Civil Rights Activities and Communists, 1956 428
7. Liberal State Senator Henry B. Gonzalez Uses the Filibuster to
Oppose Anti-Desegregation Bills, 1957 430
8. Texas Southern University Riots, 1967 431
ESSAYS 432
Merline Pitre and Cary D. Wintz • Restoring Political Rights: The
Long Battle Against the White Primary 432
Yvonne Davis Frear • Juanita Craft and the Struggle to End
Segregation in Dallas, 1945–1955 437
FURTHER READING 443
Chapter 15 The Rise of the Republican Party and the

Transformation of Texas Politics,
1960–2015 445
DOCUMENTS 446
1. Charles Deaton Analyzes the Election of Republican Governor
William Clements, 1978 446
2. Newsweek “Laments” the Demise of the Texas Millionaire,
1986 447
3. The Houston Chronicle Explains the Political Realignment in
Texas, 1994 449
xviii CONTENTS
4. The Democrats “Last Whimper:” The Texas Monthly Assesses

the Collapse of the Democratic Party in Texas, 1998 451
5. The Houston Chronicle Explains the Republican Sweep,
1998 454
6. High Court Upholds Most of Texas Redistricting Map,
2006 455
7. Maps of Presidential Vote by County Illustrate a Geographical
Shift in Political Power, 1996, 2008, 2012 458
ESSAYS 460
James Broussard • Texas Republicans: The New Majority or
Damned by Demography 461
Charles Orson Cook • Death by a Thousand Cuts: Texas Democrats
and the New Republican Hegemony 469
FURTHER READING 476
Chapter 16 Epilogue: Into the 21st Century 477

Securing the Border, 2014–2015: Three Photographs 478
ESSAYS 480
Steve H. Murdock, Mary Zey, and Michael Cline • The New Texas:
A Demographic Analysis 480
Bryan Mealer • Fields of Fortune: Chasing the New Oil Boom in
South Texas 490
FURTHER READING 498
Preface
More scholarly and popular history has been written about Texas than perhaps
any other state. Indeed, so much attention has been devoted to some of the
more colorful aspects of Texas history—the Revolution, the cattle drives, and
the oil boom spring instantly to mind—that they have become etched indelibly
on the American popular consciousness. In recent years, however, scholars have
begun to challenge some of the most basic and time-honored assumptions about
the state’s past. To a large degree, they have been inclined to reject the Anglo-
centric perspective that has shaped much of the scholarship on the American
West—a view steeped in lore and insulated by myth. In its place, they have
constructed a new narrative, one that is informed by a greater appreciation of
the state’s multiethnic character.
Today, historians are much more inclined than their predecessors to view
the state’s past through the widest possible lens. In addition to adopting a more
inclusive approach with regard to issues of ethnicity and race, they have
employed the categories of gender, technology, urbanization, class formation,
and community development to expand our knowledge of the state’s past,
thereby linking it to the history of the nation. At the same time, Texas historians
have come to appreciate the power of myth in shaping historical memory, rec-
ognizing that the way we create myths about the past can often tell us as much
about ourselves as the past itself.
In the twenty-first century, scholars at colleges and universities in Texas and
throughout the country are actively engaged in the process of creating a new
synthesis for Texas history. But historians alone do not deserve all the credit for
these major contributions to the field. Their work has been sponsored and
assisted by professional organizations and publishers who have helped redefine
Texas history and dramatically raised the standards of scholarship. For example,
the Texas State Historical Association and its journal, the Southwestern Historical
Quarterly (both of which have entered their second century), have embraced
new perspectives on Texas history, providing important forums for new
xix
xx PREFACE
scholarship. Furthermore, as the Texas population has grown, regional historical

organizations have joined in promoting scholarship in the history and culture of
the state. The East Texas Historical Association, the West Texas Historical Asso-
ciation, and the South Texas Historical Association are expanding the field of
historical inquiry in the Lone Star State. In addition, Texas A&M University
Press continues to publish a disproportionate number of the new books on
Texas history and contributes greatly to our knowledge of the state’s past.
To fully understand Texas, one must first come to terms with the myths that
have played such a central role in defining it. In Chapter 1, Walter Buenger and
Glen Ely examine the state’s regional identity. Is Texas southern, western, or a
unique hybrid of the two? Or, as Light Cummins suggests in the third essay in
this chapter, have Texans simply appropriated a western, “cowboy” image that
does not accurately reflect the state’s heritage? The process by which Texans
have developed and promoted certain myths about the state is also the focus of
several essays in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 5, David J. Weber explains how
Texans have romanticized their struggle for independence with Mexico. In a
similar vein, Chapter 12 challenges the stereotype of the freewheeling Texas
entrepreneur, noting that urban growth in early twentieth-century Texas took
advantage of national and international economic and political developments
and was accompanied by a rather “un-Texas” concern with urban planning.
Chapter 15 chronicles and attempts to explain the unraveling of another Texas
myth—the Texas Democratic Party’s absolute control over Texas politics, and
assesses the rise of the Republican Party as the dominant force in Texas politics.
In view of the ethnic diversity that has long been one of the region’s con-
stant features, it should come as no surprise that racial conflict and accommoda-
tions are dominant themes in several of the chapters that follow. Chapter 2, for
example, examines the dislocating effects that the arrival of Europeans in Texas
had on Native Americans and studies the ways in which indigenous peoples
sought to adapt to those upheavals. Similarly, Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the
tensions that arose soon after large numbers of Anglo-Americans moved into
Mexican Texas. The interaction of ethnic groups must not be viewed strictly in
terms of a collision between immutable, monolithic forces, however. As several
essays in this volume remind us, such as those by Gregg Cantrell and Raúl
Ramos (in Chapter 4), David J. Weber (in Chapter 5), and Jane Dysart (in Chap-
ter 7), Anglo-Mexican relations were nothing if not complex, and they were
frequently characterized by cooperation and collaboration. Several chapters also
address the challenges African Americans in Texas faced in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. In Chapter 8, slavery historians Randolph B. Campbell and
Sean Kelley examine the “peculiar institution” as it existed in Texas. In Chapter 9,
Barry Crouch, who has written extensively on the state’s Freedman’s Bureau,
details the violence that freedmen confronted during this period, while Carl
Moneyhon demonstrates how some blacks assumed positions of political power,
albeit briefly.
While the issue of ethnic conflict is woven throughout the fabric of the
book, another theme that figures prominently in several chapters is the process
of community building and state formation. Chapter 3, for example, focuses on
PREFACE xxi
the obstacles Spain encountered in its attempts to establish a permanent presence

north of the Rio Grande, while Chapter 6 examines the challenges
Anglo-Texans faced as they set about the task of nation-building after winning
independence from Mexico. In Chapter 8, Walter L. Buenger seeks to place
antebellum Texas firmly in a southern regional context and thereby helps to
explain the path Texans chose in their decision to join the Confederacy in
1861. Similarly, Chapter 10 examines the settlement of the frontier in post–
Civil War Texas, both the western and southern frontiers, emphasizing the
diversity of the cultural forces and human participants in this process.
Several chapters also reflect historians’ interest in gender issues. Chapter 7
focuses on the special challenges that men and women faced in the highly
fluid social conditions that existed in a frontier environment. Chapter 11
focuses on the role of women in the political and social movements of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subsequent chapters also focus
particular attention on the role that women have played in the struggle for
racial and civil rights. In Chapter 14, Merline Pitre and Yvonne Davis Freer
describe the leadership role of African American women in the state’s early
civil rights movement.
This volume adheres to the format of other volumes in the Major Problems
series, introducing students to some of the most important issues in the field of
Texas history through a mix of primary sources and scholarly interpretations.
Chapter introductions and headnotes for the documents and essays seek to pro-
vide historical context as well as to help students view the material in a concep-
tual manner by posing questions for further consideration. Organized
chronologically, the documents and essays in each chapter highlight a particular
problem or theme in Texas history and are designed to encourage students’ criti-
cal thinking skills and stimulate classroom discussion. The documents are drawn
from a wide variety of sources, including letters, diaries, oral histories, poems,
songs, broadsides, government reports, political and institutional papers, court
rulings, legislative acts, and newspaper editorials and columns. The interpretive
essays represent classic writers of the state’s history and the most innovative scho-
lars working in the field of Texas history today. Some essays were selected
because they draw wholly divergent conclusions from the same materials; others
were chosen for the way in which they complement one another, by approach-
ing a particular topic from different perspectives. In both cases, the selections are
intended to demonstrate that the past should be viewed not as a single narrative
but from multiple viewpoints, each valid in its own way. At the end of each
chapter is a Further Reading section that alerts students to some of the most sig-
nificant new scholarship as well as classic studies.
The authors would like to thank Thomas G. Paterson, former general editor
of the Major Problems in American History series, and Clint Attebery, U.S. his-
tory editor at Cengage, for working with us to prepare a second edition of Major
Problems in Texas History. Our development editor at Cengage, Terri Wise,
patiently shepherded this manuscript through every stage of the publication pro-
cess, while Pradhiba Kannaiyan kept us on task during the production phase of
the project.
xxii PREFACE
The authors are indebted to many people who gave freely of their time
and expertise for this project. Particularly helpful was the staff of the Special
Collections of the University of Texas at Arlington and the Dolph Briscoe
Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. We would
like especially to thank Scott Nicol for contributing the two photographs of
the border fence in South Texas; CPT Martha Nigrelle, from the Texas National
Guard Public Affairs Office; Camp Mabry, for securing permission to use MAJ
Randall Stillinger’s photograph of Texas Military Forces on the South Texas
border; and Michael Berryhill of Texas Southern University for helping
us track down a photograph of the TSU Riots. Francine Cronshaw translated
Spanish-language documents into English, and Adrian Anderson contributed
suggestions and inspiration. Elizabeth York, administrative assistant at the Center
for Greater Southwestern Studies, University of Texas at Arlington, provided
invaluable assistance with the editing of this volume. The second edition contains
eleven new essays written for this volume by the following historians—independent
scholar Glen Sample Ely; Juliana Barr (Duke University); Raúl Ramos (University
of Houston); F. Todd Smith (University of North Texas); Jimmy L. Bryan (Lamar
University); Angela Boswell (Henderson State University); James Leiker (Johnson
County Community College); Charles Orson Cook (retired from St. John’s
School and the University of Houston); James Broussard (Lebanon Valley Col-
lege), Merline Pitre (Texas Southern University), who co-authored an essay with
one of our editors; and Steven Murdock, Mary Zey, and Michael Cline (Hobby
Center for the Study of Texas, Rice University). We thank these scholars for their
generous contributions to this project. We also thank the anonymous reviewers of
this volume for their comments, which guided our revisions for the second
edition.
Finally, this book is dedicated to Adrian S. Haynes, Alexander De Cordova
Wintz, and Ethan David Wintz, a new generation of Texans.
S. W. H.
C. D. W.
About the Authors
SAM W. HAYNES is a professor of History and direc-

tor of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies at
the University of Texas at Arlington. Specializing in
Jacksonian America, 19th century Texas and the Amer-
ican Southwest, Haynes is the author of three books and
several co-authored texts. His most recent monograph,
Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a
British World (2010), explores the role Great Britain
played in the formation of an American national iden-
tity. He is also the author of a biography of James K. Polk, entitled James K. Polk
and the Expansionist Impulse (1996), now in its third edition. His first book, Soldiers
of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Expeditions (1990), examined Texas-Mexico
border relations in the 1840s. He is also the co-editor, with Gerald Saxon, of an
anthology of essays on the Texas Revolution, entitled Contested Empire: Rethink-
ing the Texas Revolution (2015). Haynes has served as an historical consultant for
documentaries produced by PBS and the History Channel. The recipient of sev-
eral research fellowships, including a Dobie Paisano Writers’ Fellowship, he is a
member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Haynes holds a B.A. from Columbia
University and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.
CARY D. WINTZ is the Distinguished Professor of His-

tory at Texas Southern University. He teaches courses in
Texas history, Mexican American history, and African
American history. He received his Ph.D. in history from
Kansas State University. He is the author, coauthor, or
editor of a number books, including Black Culture and
the Harlem Renaissance (1988), Texas: The Lone Star State
(2005), African American Political Thought, 1899–1930:
Washington, Du Bois, Garvey, and Randolph (1996); The
xxiii
xxiv ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Harlem Renaissance in the American West (2012), and Discovering Texas History (2014).
He has also published a number of articles and chapters in books in Texas history
and African American history. He is currently working on one new book and a
new edition of another. Wintz is the recipient of five grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and he has traveled abroad on a Fulbright grant
and on fellowships from the Korea Society and the Mobil Foundation. He is the
past president of the Southwestern Social Science Association and a Fellow of the
Texas State Historical Association.
CHAPTER 1
Enduring Myths and the Land
Texas has always been defined as much by its myths as by its past. Perhaps more than any
other state, Texas can claim a vibrant popular history, one that is familiar not only to
natives of the state, but to many people far beyond its borders. At the core of this popular
history are such events as the rebellion against Mexico, Indian wars, the cattle drives and
the open range, and the oil boom—episodes that are often cited as evidence of the state’s
unique frontier heritage and the spirit of individualism that it purportedly engendered. Yet
these images are so deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness that they often tend to
obscure other facets of the historical record. To regard Texas history as the narrative of
Anglo males engaged in a process of triumphant conquest over alien enemies and a hostile
environment is to provide an unbalanced and distorted view of the state’s past.
This popular version of the state’s history has proven remarkably resilient to revisionist
challenge. Certainly Hollywood and television—the twin engines of American cultural
myth production—have done their part to promote Texas stereotypes, inoculating Texans
from the disquieting realities of change and modernization. For much of the twentieth cen-
tury, Texas historians were willing recruits on behalf of this traditional interpretation. To a
large degree, scholars took their cue from the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner,
who attached special importance to the Anglo-American westward push across the continent
in his famous address, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in 1893.
According to Turner, the process of “taming the wilderness” endowed earlier generations
with a frontier spirit that became embedded in the American character. Texas, with its
history of violent conflict with Mexico and various Indian tribes, appeared to be a template
for Turner’s frontier thesis. Some scholars even set about to prove what the general public
had long suspected—that the state’s frontier heritage had stamped Texans with a unique
identity, an exaggerated form of “Americanness.”
In recent years, Texas historians have tended to reject this interpretation and the chau-
vinism that has so often accompanied it. Reflecting the concerns of historians in other
fields, they have pursued new areas of interest that include gender relations, ethnicity,
class formation, and urban and technological change. In short, they are no longer fixated
on the martial heroics of Anglo alpha males. The state’s demographic and economic land-
scape has also led historians to move in new historiographical directions. It is estimated that
Latinos will become the state’s largest ethnic group by 2025, and will constitute a majority
1
2 CHAPTER 1
by mid-century. Oil and gas, the mainstays of the Texas economy in the twentieth cen-
tury, are being eclipsed by a burgeoning information technologies industry. Texas, still
often characterized in popular literature as a rugged wilderness, has become an urban
state: 85% of its population lives in cities. Twenty-first century Texas offers few vestiges
of its frontier heritage, prompting present-day historians to question whether that period of
the state’s past has been given undue emphasis.
These debates serve to highlight the fundamental but frequently overlooked fact that history
and historical memory are rarely if ever the same. The traditional interpretation of Texas history
may continue to appeal to many Anglo-Texas males, but it cannot have the same resonance for
women or for non-white ethnic groups. The past can be seen from multiple perspectives, each
valid in its own way, but necessarily incomplete. Only by adopting a more inclusionary approach
can historians hope to present a reasonably complete version of the past.
ESSAYS
The extent to which Texas shares a broad southern regional identity has long
intrigued historians, for it calls into question the state’s vaunted claim to unique-
ness. Some scholars have argued that the bitter experience of the Civil War
prompted Texans in later years to downplay their southern roots. In a subcon-
scious effort to disassociate Texas from the trauma of the Lost Cause, they tai-
lored their historical memory to give greater emphasis to the state’s frontier
heritage. In so doing, they laid claim to an artificial brand of exceptionalism,
constructing an elaborate and ennobling mythology around the exploits of
Anglo-Texans in their struggles against Mexico and Native Americans.
In the first essay, Walter L. Buenger, a professor of history at Texas A&M
University, argues that the state’s identity cannot be understood without an
appreciation for the profound connections that bind Texas to the Deep South.
Although most, if not all, historians would concede that East Texas closely
resembles the South in both economy and culture, Buenger goes further, stating
that westward-moving white southerners brought their traditions with them as
they settled in other parts of the state. “Texans,” he writes, “did not stop being
southern on the South Plains.” During the early twentieth century, Anglos
embraced their frontier past, highlighting the struggle for independence against
Mexico—and its most enduring icon, the Alamo. In so doing, Buenger argues,
they constructed a “false façade” that masked the state’s southernness.
In the second essay, independent scholar Glen Sample Ely cautions against
an uncritical acceptance of what he calls the “Southern School” of Texas history.
From an environmental perspective, Ely argues that west of the 100th meridian
geographic factors such as aridity served to loosen the region’s ties to a southern
way of life. And while segregation and other forms of institutionalized racism
existed in West Texas, Ely suggests that efforts to restrict the rights of minorities
were more characteristic of the Sunbelt than of the Deep South.
In the third essay, Light Townsend Cummins, a professor of history at
Austin College, takes a different approach to this ongoing debate. While
acknowledging that Texas has been shaped by its southern heritage, Cummins
ENDURING MYTHS AND THE LAND 3
draws attention to the disconnect between the empirical record and public
memory. Anglo-Texans may well have shared with southern whites many of
the same cultural chromosomes, but in the early decades of the twentieth
century they fashioned a new, more colorful public identity, one that evoked
images of the Old West. This trend was already under way by the 1930s, but
the Texas Centennial celebration in 1936, which presented a slickly packaged
image of the state to the rest of the country, provided a unique “rebranding”
opportunity.
Texas and the South

WALTER L. BUENGER
A FEW YEARS AGO IN PLAINVIEW, TEXAS, I LISTENED AGAIN TO THE stories of my
mother’s family, the Coxes and the Thompsons. While the landscape of the
South Plains certainly does not look southern, I finally understood that these
were southern people and this a southern place—with a Texas twist.
One great-grandfather grew up in Mississippi during the Civil War. For four
years he hid his favorite horse from marauding troops. Near the end of the war
great-grandfather heard about another batch of soldiers who were stripping the
neighborhood clean and responded by leading his horse into the barn and cleverly
covering it with hay. The soldiers never found the horse, but they set the barn on
fire, burning it and the horse to ashes. William Humphrey, a novelist from North-
east Texas, insisted it was a “feeling of identity with the dead which characterizes
and explains the Southerner.” That was why families told and retold stories such as
this one about my great-grandfather. Stories bound families not only to their
departed ancestors, but to a separate and distinctive South. Another Northeast
Texas writer, William A. Owens, asserted that in the early twentieth century
“hatred of Yankees and carpetbaggers had diminished only a little” in his native
region and that this passion passed from generation to generation through stories.
Yet after hearing the story of the horse and the burned barn many times, that day I
realized one important point varied from telling to telling—half the time Confed-
erate troops burned the horse and barn, not Yankees.
After the war the Coxes and Thompsons moved from Alabama and Missis-
sippi westward to Texas. They kept moving west sometimes on one side of the
Red River and sometimes on the other until soon after 1900 they crossed the
caprock in covered wagons and settled north of Lubbock in Hale County. Their
stories and their migration pattern lead to the first of three important points
about Texas and the South. All of Texas is connected—each region to the
other and each region to the South. The second point is remember the Alamo,
but forget the time period from the Alamo to the end of Reconstruction. The
third is allow for complexity.
By way of introduction to the need for benign neglect of the mid-
nineteenth century and the importance of recognizing that Texas culture
Walter L. Buenger, “Texas and the South,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 103 (January 2000): 309–32.
4 CHAPTER 1
evolved over time in an intricate, often contradictory pattern, let me expand on

the theme of connectedness. Most historians of the South include the eastern
third of the state in their work but exclude South Texas and West Texas. Having
become an article of faith, historian after historian unquestioningly accepts this
division. More accurately political, social, cultural, and most especially economic
characteristics entwined the most southern and the least southern counties of
Texas. Each influenced the other.…
Despite adapting to geography and responding to opportunity, Texans did
not stop being southern on the South Plains. Farmers combined the use of
mules, tractors, and other new machines in the cultivation of cotton, their tradi-
tional southern crop. While the flat land and particular climate of the South
Plains let them try such novelties as the picket fence stripper used to harvest cot-
ton, they pulled that stripper with mules and horses. They moved beyond a
southern labor-intensive model, perhaps, but they clearly began all that they
did from a southern base.
Other examples of the southern base of western Texas abound. Racism—
such as whites hiding dynamite in black farmer’s fields for them to hit with their
plows—kept blacks from moving west. Religion, too, forged a strong link
between the South Plains, eastern Texas, and the South. By 1926 the religious
fingerprint of the Lubbock area closely matched eastern Texas and the Deep
South. In the six counties surrounding Lubbock, church membership tripled
from 1916 to 1926, and in 1926 Southern Baptists and members of the Method-
ist Episcopal Church, South comprised two-thirds of all church members.…
Something within the history profession or society blocks understanding of
these connections to the South. It remains true, as Robert A. Calvert and I
wrote almost a decade ago, that standard, widely accepted interpretations of the
past “inhibit the full development of Texas history and warp society’s perception
of its current identity.” We have substituted memory for history. Memory erases
ambiguity and retards analysis of what is included and omitted in our public per-
ception of the past. Once created and anchored in stories, movies, myths, monu-
ments, shrines, and other public reservoirs of past glories, as Michel-Rolph
Trouillot observed, memory becomes part of “the silencing of dissent.” Histor-
ians have allowed memory’s false facade to obscure the lessons that the Alamo
teaches.
Nothing better demonstrates the false facade of Texas history and the need to
readjust our sights away from the mid-nineteenth century than a survey of how
Texans have commemorated their past. Eternal and constant celebrations of a dis-
tinctive past have not characterized Texas. While observance of special days and
celebration of Texas heroes appeared periodically in the years after the Texas Rev-
olution in 1836, ardor for the cause marked the twentieth not the nineteenth cen-
tury. When the original Alamo memorial on the state capitol grounds burned in
1881 a decade passed before it was replaced. The Alamo itself grew increasingly
dilapidated through the 1890s. Before 1900 nationalistic pronouncements about
Texas seldom flavored public discourse or shaped public policy. Instead, at such
key moments as the vote for annexation to the United States in 1845, joining
with the Confederacy in 1861, redeeming the state during Reconstruction, and
proselytizing populism in the 1890s, Texans acted as southerners and gave short
shrift to proponents of Texas nationalism and Texas exceptionalism.
Memories of a Texas past made no difference in the course of major events,
indicating that they made little difference in individual Texan’s lives. Historian
David Thelen noted in 1989: “Since politicians must by trade find memories
that still have private resonance for large numbers of voters, politics opens
many ways for exploring how individuals connected (or failed to connect) their
private memories with the defining memories of larger groups and associations.”
The absence of any significant political use of Texas distinctiveness meant
nineteenth-century politicians saw little to be gained among their constituents
in beating the drum of Texas history. That would change in the twentieth
century.
The Alamo, the central symbol of modern day memories of Texas, best
indicated the disregard for things Texan before the early years of the twentieth
century. In 1904 Clara Driscoll purchased the site to keep it from falling down.
Through her efforts and those of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the
Alamo and its curved gable became the preeminent symbol of Texas. The roof
line was symbolic in more ways than one, for it had been added on to a flat roof
line in the 1840s long after the 1836 battle. Remember the Alamo: remember
that veneration of the site changed with time and that the symbol we know
bears only a faint resemblance to the building as it existed in 1836.…
Every year I teach an upper-level Texas history class called “Texas since
1845.” Typically my students read Campbell’s An Empire for Slavery, among the
most important books about Texas, and they write a précis of the book. Because
Campbell’s book is so well organized and straightforward, there is no doubting
that one of its central themes is that slavery made Texas like the South. Yet over
half my students cannot identify that obvious point as a central theme of
the book. Now Aggie jokes aside, these are pretty good students. It is not the
book and not the students, but the mindset with which they approach the book
that causes the problem. To them Texas history runs from 1836 to 1876 and
includes fighting Mexicans, fighting Indians, fighting Yankees, and overcoming
the wilderness. It also includes some stray observations about villainous carpet-
baggers and the injustice of Reconstruction. Texas myths, like the gabled roof
line of the Alamo, remain so much a part of everyday life that even the most
accurate and clearly written history of the mid-nineteenth century falls on a
deaf public.…
Yet the public and the profession are less disconnected than many believe—
both reside in a self-sustaining loop. Public interest encourages professional his-
torians to write about the era. More books on the period confirm for the public
that all that mattered in Texas happened in heroic fashion between 1836 and
1876. In the end, concentration on the mid-nineteenth century by professional
historians not only does little to shake public misconceptions of the period, it
distorts awareness and analysis of the years before and after. Accepting that all
that followed 1876 happened within the permanent boundaries of the past vol-
untarily blindfolds historians and the public to testimony to the contrary. Taken
too far, the argument that “the traditions of modern Texas had taken root by
6 CHAPTER 1
1876” inhibits the most basic tasks of history: the examination of change over
time and the unearthing and analysis of new evidence.
Thus, we should attack misconceptions about the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury in a more indirect and therefore more effective manner and avoid the
intellectual paralysis that accompanies the creation myth of modern Texas.
Achieving these goals could take many forms.… Monuments, celebrations,
textbooks, and lynchings, however, offer the best way of thinking about the
changing connection between Texas and the South, and of understanding
why students reject the notion of Texas as a southern, slave holding place.
This requires that we allow for complexity—for change over time and for
cultural cross currents.
In “Free Speech and the ‘Lost Cause’ in Texas,” Fred Arthur Bailey makes
the important point that, “Historical truth, as defined and dictated by the Con-
federate societies, insured that Southerners would retain cultural values ultimately
detrimental to the progress of their own native land.” Between 1890 and 1920,
white Texans, like other southerners, organized Confederate veteran’s groups,
built monuments to Confederate soldiers, held elaborate Confederate reunions,
and as Bailey made clear, sanitized public school textbooks so that they reflected
a proper southern point of view.
Instead of receding with time, memories of a Confederate past grew larger.
In 1911, fifty years after the start of the Civil War, aged veterans began planning
a monument in Mount Pleasant. Quickly rounding up community support they
built a forty-foot tall structure that cost about five thousand dollars. Such cele-
brations and commemorations of the Confederate past unified all southern
whites behind a popular mythos and further segregated blacks by defining their
roles as happy, loyal, and submissive servants. This served a double purpose. It
demonstrated the supposedly positive side of slavery and set up a damning con-
trast with post-1890 blacks, whom whites often described as beastlike and in
need of the discipline of prohibition, segregation, and lynching. Memory
silenced dissent about segregation and erased the evilness of slavery and
lynching.
In contrast to this vigorous effort to promote southern history for conserva-
tive purposes, in 1902 the Daughters of the Republic of Texas offered a prize of
one hundred dollars for the best poem on the Texas flag. Only 125 school chil-
dren entered the statewide contest. None of the poems were judged worthy of
the prize.
Meanwhile, George W. Littlefield, a Civil War veteran and successful entre-
preneur, led the fight to memorialize the South. He successfully pressured the
University of Texas to stop using a history text he believed had a northern
bias. Then he funded a collection of historical documents pertaining to the
South. When he died in Austin in 1920, his legacy was all around.
Part of that legacy was more complicated than the culturally narrow, mind
numbing, initiative robbing picture Bailey painted. Littlefield’s fortune sprang
from ranching as well as from traditional southern plantations. In fact, one of
these ranches west of Lubbock around the town of Littlefield turned into farms
during the World War I years. When the nine-story Littlefield Building opened
in downtown Austin in 1911, paintings of his ranches graced the lobby. At

Littlefield’s request the bronze doors to the building also depicted ranch scenes.
He also left behind the ornate Littlefield Fountain at the south edge of the
University of Texas campus—a fountain dedicated to both Confederate and
World War I soldiers. As this fountain symbolized, Littlefield was both southern
and American, both an obstructor of the integration of the South back into full
membership in the nation and a facilitator of that process. In the decade and a
half after his death his state would take those typically Texas ranch scenes, throw
in a dash of fighting the Mexicans at the Alamo and San Jacinto, and remember
their past as far more American than southern. In just one example of how this
process worked, cowboy songs emerged in Texas during the 1920s and soon
evolved into an integral part of American culture.
William Humphrey, born in Red River County a few years after Littlefield’s
death, also wrestled with being Texan and southern. In No Resting Place Humphrey
described how Clarksville’s children first reenacted the Texas Revolution in 1936:
“For us schoolchildren that year it was hard to believe that Texas had begun in
1836; to us it seemed more as though it had stopped then.… With school out, on
Saturdays, in vacant lots all over town, the Battle of the Alamo was refought weekly,
and the following day, in Sunday school, there was a deliberate confounding of the
exodus led by Moses out of Egypt with the one of Moses Austin, and of Sam Hous-
ton at San Jacinto with Josuah at Jericho.” Yet Humphrey always described himself
“as a southerner.”…
Humphrey declared: “History is heavily edited for schoolchildren and, for
most of us, commencement puts an end to study. Thus we go through life
with notions of our past which, for depth, complexity, subtlety of shading,
rank with comic books. Texas history particularly lends itself to this.…
On April 21, 1922, as local schoolchildren took the day off to have a picnic, the
editor of the Paris News published a long editorial on the lessons of San Jacinto. He
wrote that San Jacinto “was a tremendous victory for the Americans—who fought
to secure schools for their children, religious liberty for themselves, a right to the
pursuit of happiness in their own way.” Note that Americans won at San Jacinto,
not Texans or southerners, and American notions of progress fueled the editor’s
message. For him and others, this battle linked Texas to an American past and an
American future. Texans were on the verge of achieving their “destiny.”
Part of that destiny was ending lynching. From 1880 to 1930 one estimate
placed the total number of people lynched in Texas at just under five hundred,
ranking Texas third behind Mississippi and Georgia on the disreputable list of
lynching sites. Especially after 1890, most of those lynched were black victims
of white mobs.
White Texans specialized in burning blacks alive. Violence and brutality peaked
in the 1890s when in one famous 1893 example in Paris, Texas, whites slowly burned
and tortured Henry Smith, a black accused of murdering a young white girl. More
than fifteen thousand people watched this barbaric ritual “with evident satisfaction,”
and many surged forward to seize bits of Smith’s bones and scraps of his clothing as
souvenirs. Lynching gradually became less common and evoked a more critical
response from white elites. Yet as late as 1920 the good citizens of Paris and Lamar
8 CHAPTER 1
County broke open the jail and seized Herman and Irving Arthur, two brothers
accused of murdering their white landlord and his son. The black victims were
taken to the fairgrounds outside of town, burned to death, and their charred remains
were dragged behind an automobile through the black section of Paris.
Lest you think lynching was confined to East Texas, understand that lynchings
occurred across the state and blacks faced the greatest danger in counties where
they comprised about one-third of the population. In 1897, out of twenty-six
recorded lynchings, seventeen occurred in counties west of the Trinity River
compared to nine in counties east of the Trinity. The prevalence and location of
lynching in Texas fit a southern pattern, offering the most powerful evidence
available on the long connection between the state and the South. Yet as Table
1 demonstrates, lynching slowed in Texas after 1920 and virtually vanished by
1936. Attacked by local whites as bad for business and a threat to law and order,
it also increasingly was depicted as un-American. In Mississippi and other southern
states, lynching slowed, but it also went underground and unreported. As late as
1936, Mississippi’s foes of lynching still struggled to win support from women’s
organizations in the Baptist and Methodist churches because these pillars of reform
feared standing against something so deeply woven into their state’s history and
everyday life. A year later near Duck Hill, Mississippi, a white sheriff and district
attorney watched as a white mob burned two blacks to death with blow torches.”
In Texas, only one lynching occurred after 1936 and little evidence exists to
suggest that lynching went underground and unreported. Once the 1936 Centen-
nial Celebration focused increased attention on a unique and exceptional Texas
past, lynching seemed out of character with the goals and aspirations of Texans.
A new persona for the state not only slowed lynching, it erased its memory and
the memory of slavery. Knowledge of the extent of lynching and slavery quickly
receded. Few now remember either existed, let alone consider their implications.
Commemoration of the Texas Revolution in 1936 served as a visible symbol
of a two-decade old reality—the conscious and unconscious distancing of a peo-
ple from the South of defeat, poor expectations, and racial brutality.…
Defeatism and fear of innovation, if not defensiveness, evaporated with the
increased importance of nineteenth-century Texas legends and the decreased
importance of the Lost Cause. Texans abandoned the limited possibilities and
racist ideology implicit in the Lost Cause and adopted the mantle of progress of
the Texas Revolution. Ironically, in another example of memory’s purpose,
as the dominance of Texas history solidified, the Texas Revolution helped justify
TABLE 1 Number of Texans Lynched by Race and Ethnicity
1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s
Anglo 79 20 2 3 4 0
Black 64 114 80 55 42 11
Mexican 12 4 2 29 1 0
SOURCE: Daniel T. Williams, Amid the Gathering Multitude: The Story of Lynching in America: A Classified Listing (Tuskegee University,
1968).
the exclusion and segregation of Mexican Texans. As Richard Flores recently

argued, memories of the revolution anchored to the Alamo closed “American
minds.” Yet that function of the creation myth united instead of separated
Anglo Texans from other Americans of European origin. Throughout the
United States, after 1880 old-stock Americans of European origin increasingly
used history or memory to separate themselves from other Americans, and the
Alamo fit nicely into this national pattern. New uses of the past brought a double
reward. Anglo Texans achieved and still achieve not only “reconciliation of
progress and tradition” but also integration into the broader nation by remem-
bering a less southern past. Thus, my family at least tacitly admitted that Con-
federates burned and robbed as well as Yankees.
Like the rest of the South, Texans remain history-ridden, but by adopting
different memories they partially escaped an enervating defense of tradition. Tex-
ans escaped from the defeated, isolated, impoverished, brutally bigoted South by
remaking memory, but that escape bore a price. The divorce of memory and
reality, the erasing of the record of long and close association between Texas
and the South, means as William Humphrey pointed out, that knowledge
about Texas’s past often sinks to the level of comic books.
Texas: Where the West Begins

GLEN SAMPLE ELY
The motto on the side of the parked police cruiser reads “Fort Worth: Where
the West Begins.” Since the 1920s, the City of Fort Worth has actively pro-
moted this slogan, endeavoring to brand Fort Worth as “western.” With its old
frontier fort, Stock Show, Stockyards, Wild West shows, Sundance Square (after
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), cattle drives, cowboys, and shootouts, Fort
Worth certainly seems to exude a western identity.
Fort Worth promotes a western image and markets itself as “Where the West
Begins,” but is this really the case? Is it part of the American West? Consider the
following. In 1860, vigilante mobs lynched two alleged abolitionists, one of them
a Methodist minister. Citizens of Fort Worth were petrified that abolitionist allies
of John Brown, who led the October 16, 1859, raid on Harpers Ferry Virginia,
would try and foment a similar slave revolt in North Texas.
Finally, consider Tarrant County (where Fort Worth is the county seat) and its
vote in the statewide secession referendum of February 23, 1861. On that date
Tarrant County voted overwhelmingly for secession by an almost four to one
margin. Clearly, local residents were concerned with protecting slavery, stopping
abolitionists, and preventing slave rebellions. While the city may promote itself
today as western, on the eve of the Civil War its mindset appeared decidedly
southern. Fort Worth’s identity, then, is both confusing and contradictory.
Fort Worth’s example is representative of Texas as a whole. Like Fort
Worth, Texas is wrestling with an identity crisis. Today, the Lone Star State
Essay by Glen Sample Ely, written for this volume. Reprinted with permission of the author.
10 CHAPTER 1
sometimes resembles a lumbering Atlas shouldering the unwieldy burden of mul-

tiple personalities. The state is in the midst of a culture war for control of its
identity and history. Some Lone Star scholars insist that Texas, with its heritage
of slavery, segregation, and historic dependence upon cotton, is southern.
Another group of historians argue that Texas is western, as evidenced by its cow-
boys, cattle drives, mountains, and desert. Still others say that the state is unique,
winning its independence from Mexico and existing as an independent republic
for ten years before joining the Union.
Throughout its existence, Texas has juggled a complicated assortment of
identities. Consequently, the state’s multiple characteristics often confuse histor-
ians. Because many southern and western scholars do not know what to make of
Texas, they ignore it altogether. Perhaps the Lone Star State and its multiple
identities are just too confusing to unravel. With its immense land size, its nota-
ble environmental, geographical, and cultural differences, its status as a one-time
independent republic, its colorful history and larger-than-life legends, Texas does
indeed seem “like a whole other country.”
At various times during its history, people have viewed the Lone Star State
as western, southern, and one of a kind. Over the last several decades, however,
scholars of Texas’s Southern School, notably, Randolph Campbell and Walter
Buenger, have increasingly promoted what Buenger calls “the oneness of Texas
and the rest of the South.” Several issues drive this new southern orientation.
The first is what Paul Lack calls “the Long Shadow of Eugene C. Barker.”
Lack might well have added Barker’s fellow historian Walter Prescott Webb
and folklorist-author J. Frank Dobie to that long shadow. All three men were
devotees of Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis that was much in
vogue during the first half of the twentieth century.
For many years Texas’s Old West Guard of Barker, Webb, and Dobie
exerted significant influence on the scope of Lone Star history and literature.
Their chauvinistic glorification of Anglo Americans marching inexorably west-
ward and conquering the frontier dominated Texas publications for decades.
The wide acclaim and success that the three men enjoyed from their books
only served to stifle alternative viewpoints and voices. Minorities, women,
and another part of Texas, southern Texas, received scant recognition during
this period. For many years Texas writers of both southern history and litera-
ture chafed under the Old Guard’s “long western shadow.” With the passing of
the three men by the mid-1960s, their concept of Texas and its history was
open to challenge.
Since the late 1980s, Texas’s Southern School has actively reshaped the dis-
cussion of Lone Star history to fit its perspective, a southern perspective. These
historians argue that Texas is actually southern in nature, and they dismiss West
Texas’s rich heritage as brief and limited and of only marginal import to the
state’s overall history. Ironically, by seeing Lone Star history as primarily south-
ern, these scholars have in turn cast their own “long southern shadow,” a vision
every bit as stifling as the Old Guard’s western shadow.
In shaping their perception of Lone Star history and memory, Texas’s
Southern School portrays the eastern half of Texas and its southern heritage as
the “real” Texas, or the “most important part” of Texas, while marginalizing a
Texan West. Their “Texas is southern” vision falls apart, however, when one
looks closely at the long duré of West Texas. Attempts to superimpose a pre-
dominant southern culture, Old South slavery, and a southern agrarian model
upon the western region of Texas, from its Spanish period to the twenty-first
century and beyond, are simply not sustainable.
For several decades, arguments by Texas’s Southern School have largely
gone unanswered. It is time, then, to take a fresh look at what exactly Texas is
and what it is not. Is Texas southern? Does the American West begin in the
western part of Texas, and if so, how can one accurately discern this? Environ-
ment, culture, and race relations all prove accurate indicators.
The eastern half of Texas is rooted in the American South. The western
third of the state is part of the American West. In between the two is a shatter-
belt or transition zone. This shatterbelt extends westward from Interstate 35 near
the 98th meridian, to Sweetwater, Texas, west of the 100th meridian. Within
this transition zone, America’s South collides with the West, scattering and com-
mingling fragments of each over a broad area. Ecologically and culturally, Texas’s
shatterbelt has a mixed identity, possessing both southern and western character-
istics. By the time one reaches Sweetwater, however, this part of Texas westward
to El Paso clearly has far more in common with the American West than it does
with the Old South.
Regarding the environment, a defining characteristic of the West is aridity.
John Wesley Powell’s 1878 congressional report revealed that for agriculture in
the United States to be successful, it required rainfall of at least twenty inches a
year. Any crops receiving less than that amount would fail. Much of the West
gets less than twenty inches a year, and farming in this dry region is dependent
upon irrigation. Walter Prescott Webb calls this rainfall break point an “institu-
tional fault” zone where “the ways of life and of living changed.” In Texas, the
twenty-inch rainfall line falls near Amarillo, Lubbock, Colorado City, and Del
Rio. Webb incorrectly stated that in Texas the American West begins at the
98th meridian, which approximates today’s Interstate 35 corridor. According to
the National Weather Service, cities on Interstate 35, from Fort Worth to
Austin, average 33 inches a year, or 50% more than regions in the American
West. Environmentally, Interstate 35 is not part of the West.
Turning next to culture and race relations, the demographics for Texas west of
the 100th meridian reveal that in 1860, white Southerners, those from the Upper and
Lower South, represented only 3% of the area’s residents. African-American slaves
comprised only four-tenths of one percent. Texas’s neighbor to the west, New Mex-
ico Territory (which included Arizona), had an even smaller southern presence.
According to a federal analysis of the 1860 census, Anglo Southerners represented
less than one percent of the population in the territory and there were no slaves.
During the antebellum period, Texans living west of the 100th meridian
depended far more upon the federal government, the U.S. Army, and the post-
master general than upon the South and its slave-cotton economy. Texas, still
mired in debt from its Republic period, was of little help to its western citizens.
Additionally, one reason why so few southerners moved to the western part of
12 CHAPTER 1
102° 100°
Texas
N
Shatterbelt
W E Region
S
98°
20-Inch Rainfall
Break Line in Texas
© Cengage Learning
Texas Counties Map courtesy of Texas Parks & Wildlife Department
(Details added by author)
Map of Texas with 20-Inch Rainfall Break Line and Shatterbelt Region.
the state before the Civil War is that the arid lands beyond the 100th meridian
loomed as a formidable environmental impediment to widespread Southern cotton
agriculture. Effective irrigation technology did not exist before World War I.
Besides being an environmental hindrance, from 1861 to 1865, West Texas
also emerged as a daunting cultural barrier to the expansion of Old South ideol-
ogy. Many in the region, dependent upon the federal frontier economy for their
livelihoods, rejected southern identity, values, and slavery, believing that the
Confederacy was not worth dying for and not worth defending. East of the
100th meridian, in Texas’s shatterbelt section, regional identity was mixed,
with some counties voting for, and others against, secession. Among counties in
the shatterbelt and west of the 100th meridian voting against disunion, lawless-
ness, disloyalty, and desertion were rampant throughout the Civil War.
Cultural geographer Terry Jordan said that “West Texas was settled largely
by East Texans,” but the record shows he is mistaken. From 1850–1890, most
people living in historic West Texas (the Trans-Pecos) were Tejanos, not south-
ern whites. It was not until after 1890 that a significant number of people from
East Texas and the South moved west of the 100th meridian. Before 1890, the
primary population movement in the region was not east to west but south to
north, from the northern Mexican frontier to West Texas.
By 1890, whites had accrued sufficient population gains and economic
capital to seize control of the region. For the next six decades until after
World War II, Anglos in West Texas dominated almost every aspect of eco-
nomic and political life, creating a segregated society and treating Mexican
Americans as second-class citizens. Whites segregated public pools, theatres,
and schools. Some southern historians might be tempted to view this segrega-
tion in West Texas as an extension of the Old South. On closer examination,
however, one sees that local segregation patterns in the region were more akin
to those of the West than the South. Research shows that African Americans
and Mexican Americans in California and Arizona also endured segregated
pools, theaters, schools, restaurants, and neighborhoods.
Troubled race relations in America are nothing new. Anglo Americans have a
national legacy of racism reaching back to the seventeenth century when whites
first encountered Native Americans. The key to understanding race relations in
West Texas is to examine the exact nature of segregation and the types of violence
that whites were employing. Studies of racism in the western half of Texas found
that from 1890 to World War II, the region was noticeably different from East
Texas and the South. In West Texas the pattern of de facto segregation (where seg-
regation occurs but is not officially sanctioned by a detailed code of legal statutes)
that evolved differed from the de jure (an elaborate legal and officially sanctioned)
system of Jim Crow laws that took root in the eastern part of Texas and the Ameri-
can South. Many exclusionary practices west of the 100th meridian were of a more
informal nature. The de facto segregation occurring in West Texas during this period
was typical of Arizona, California, and much of the American Southwest.
Another key characteristic in considering the nature of race relations in West
Texas is violence. During this period, were Mexican Americans and African
Americans in the western part of the state subjected to the same lynching culture
typical of East Texas and the South? The record shows that racial violence
beyond the 100th meridian was generally milder and of a different character
than that of the eastern section of the state, where the lynching, burning (and
occasional corpse dragging) of minorities was far more prevalent.
In the western part of the state, the lynching of minorities was rare, and the
practice of burning and dragging almost unknown. Of the 489 lynchings in
Texas from 1882–1938, only seven took place west of the 100th meridian. In
1929, Walter White noted that, “Northern and Western states have almost
completely abandoned lynching with the passing of the frontier conditions.”
The last documented lynching in Texas west of the 100th meridian was in
1910 in Rocksprings. White observed that, “Only the Southern states, and espe-
cially those to the far South, more or less regularly resort to the practice.”
14 CHAPTER 1
Bruce Glasrud and Paul Carlson found that in general, “black and white
West Texans avoided much of the bitter black/white struggle that took place
during Reconstruction.” In sum, after the Civil War, East Texas marched in tan-
dem with the South, with Jim Crow segregation and racial violence, but West
Texas proved itself different. Interactions between whites, blacks, and Tejanos in
the region more often paralleled the American West than the Old South.
From 1890 to 1980, Anglos, many of them with southern backgrounds, consti-
tuted a substantial part of West Texas’s population. Today, this composition is rapidly
changing. Many whites are leaving West Texas. At the same time, the percentage of
Hispanics is increasing. West of the Pecos River, Anglos are once again the minority
population. According to the State of Texas, by 2040 this demographic trend will
shift eastwards to include all of Texas west of the 100th meridian.
Federal census data shows that West Texas’s population forecast mirrors the
rest of the Southwest, specifically New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
In closing, some final thoughts to consider about western identity in Texas,
and specifically, how the State of Texas promotes itself. A glance at recent Texas
highway maps proves illuminating. In many of these, there is no southern imag-
ery, even though the eastern half of the state has deep southern roots. Instead,
the state tourism office depicts Texas as western, incorporating the usual stereo-
typical symbols, i.e., cowboys, horseshoes, spurs, cowboy hats, and cowboy
boots. Now the State of Texas knows that western history and the Old West
are very popular with tourists, so it astutely markets to this segment. Many cities
across Texas are also well aware of this, and they deliberately brand their com-
munities as western, whether they actually are or not.
Fort Worth and Belton, located on Interstate 35, are two good examples.
Both cities feature western-themed websites, with cowboys on horseback
silhouetted against a romantic sunset, longhorn cattle, Chisholm Trail logos,
and Texas Ranger badges. Fort Worth claims that it is where the West begins,
but it isn’t. Regional identity on Interstate 35 north of Austin is mixed and is
definitely more southern than western.
For instance, in the early 1860s, locals hung more than 40 people in Gaines-
ville and another two in Fort Worth for allegedly trying to incite an armed slave
rebellion. Along this corridor, Tarrant, Dallas, Hill, McLennan, and Bell Coun-
ties all voted strongly for secession. From 1884 to 1920, more than 35,000 resi-
dents participated in a number of grisly lynchings from Hillsboro to Belton, to
Temple, and to Waco. Clearly, these communities along present-day Interstate
35 were exhibiting ideology and racial violence typical of the Old South.
Today, cities like Fort Worth and Belton not only promote themselves as
western, but also deliberately downplay their deep southern roots. They project
a western identity to attract more tourist dollars to their cities, but the downside
is that they are forgetting their authentic southern heritage, and in the process are
creating an unrepresentative and artificial legacy. Like many of these communi-
ties, the State of Texas projects a western identity in part because it has yet to
figure out how to market its southern heritage. Southern identity can be messy.
There is slavery, secession, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segrega-
tion, and lynching to deal with. Perhaps Texas’s tourism office views western
identity as less problematic, an easier sell to tourists and not freighted with so
much troubling baggage. One hopes that someday the state will discover a use-
able southern past and begin promoting a more balanced, authentic Texas to
both visitors and residents.
While these multiple identities and selective memories have enabled Texans
to avoid unpleasant aspects of their past, they have also confused historians. Some
scholars are unsure where to place the Lone Star State in their regional studies.
Texas does not fit any facile categorizations. Walter Buenger says that interpret-
ing the state’s heritage “offers such a challenge that some historians of the South
have simply ignored Texas, leaving its history for the indiscriminate use of his-
torians of the West.” Indiscriminate use aside, a number of western scholars
ignore Texas for exactly the same reasons as their southern colleagues.
Western historians typically include Texas as part of the Old West. In their
works Texas blends seamlessly into the standard, stereotypical Wild West history
of cowboys, Indians, cattle drives, and gunslingers. A number of New Western
History studies, however, largely ignore Texas. Perhaps these scholars conceptu-
alize a “western” Texas as existing only up to 1890 and the closing of the fron-
tier. Perhaps the authors are unaware of the many collective narratives that link
New West Texas and the New West.
Many of the topics that New Western historians examine in their writings
are also relevant to West Texas. These issues are: Native Americans, Mexican
Americans, the Mexican border, the federal government’s imprint upon the
West, the frontier, aridity, water resources, irrigated agriculture, ranching and
western rangeland management, extractive industries, nuclear waste disposal,
gentrification of the West, and the romantic myth of the West as a place of
escape and renewal. A side-by-side comparison of this list reveals that New
West Texas and the New American West share many of the same issues. Just as
West Texas was once part of the Old West, it is still part of the New West.
The Rebranding of Texas During the 1936 Centennial

LIGHT TOWNSEND CUMMINS
Whether Texas is southern or western in its basic historical character has long
been debated by historians of the Lone Star State and the Southwest. Numerous
articles, essays, and books have explicitly touched on this subject over the dec-
ades. Several scholars have played significant roles in this debate. Notably, Frank
Vandiver wrote a timely book in 1975 titled The Southwest: South or West? Van-
diver inconclusively found vestiges of both influences that shaped the region his-
torically. An important contribution to this debate occurred twenty-eight years
after Vandiver’s book when Randolph B. Campbell published his monumental
survey text, Gone to Texas: A History of the Lone Star State. Campbell came down
Light Townsend Cummins, “History, Memory, and Rebranding Texas as Western for the 1936 Centen-
nial,” from This Corner of Canaan: Essays on Texas in Honor of Randolph B. Campbell edited by Richard B.
McCaslin, Donald E. Chipman, and Andrew J. Torget (University of North Texas Press, copyright 2013).
16 CHAPTER 1
solidly on the side of southern heritage as the primary historical underpinning of

the Texas experience. This landmark volume, in addition to serving as a solid
and eminently accessible textbook of the state’s history, persuasively argued that
Anglo-American Texas had its roots indisputably in the Old South. Campbell
substantiated this conclusion by undertaking a close analysis of the Texas past to
show that the state has consistently manifested southern characteristics in its his-
torical attributes and continues to do so in the current era. One of the most
recent entries in this lively debate is the work of historian Glen Sample Ely,
who contends that Texas is predominantly western in its twentieth-century cul-
ture, especially those parts of the state that lie west of Interstate 35.
The complex notions of Texas being seen as western, southern, or a combi-
nation of both are rooted in the subtle relationship between history and memory.
There are differences between the study of history as an academic exercise and the
existence of historical memory in any given society. Campbell’s contention that
the Lone Star State is essentially southern can be classified as history. His analysis
is historiographical and based on documents gleaned from archival research in a
wide variety of sources, the formulation of historical models that interpret past
events, and the application of such constructs in creating a sustainable historio-
graphical opinion. Memory is different from such history. It constitutes popular,
publicly held views of the past that generally inform people about their historical
origins, whether or not these are supported by the archival record.…
Given the potential differences between scholarly history and public memory as
ways to conceptualize the past, this essay does not imply that Randolph B. Camp-
bell is off the mark when he says that Texas has strong predominant southern attri-
butes that are manifested well into our own time. I agree with him. It is my opinion
that, by scholarly standards as held by historians, Texas remains southern and does so
without historical debate. At the same time, however, there exists a significant west-
ern, frontier theme in Texas public memory that cannot be sustained in the same
way as historical viewpoints about southernisms. In fact, this western-based public
memory predominates in many quarters over and above any recognition of the
state’s relationship to southern history. Campbell, for one, certainly realizes this
inherent dichotomy in considering the Texas past and its public memory. “When
modern Texans in cities such as Houston,” he has noted, “put on their boots and
Stetsons and head for the rodeo or hearken back to the days of movie westerns that
portrayed their state as cowboys, rustlers, and gunfighters, they are drawing on a
collective memory that, although it has a basis in fact, is not the essence of Texas.”
Urban Houstonians can attend the rodeo dressed in their western finery
because there has been a marked and overriding disconnect between the schol-
arly history of the state and its public memory since the 1930s. Southern attri-
butes had ceased to be the state’s primary and overriding historical image by the
end of that decade. By then, Texans had come to consider themselves as wester-
ners within the parameters of public memory. In so doing, they chose to ignore
their southern historical origins as an explanation of their modern existence.
Popular culture during the 1930s increasingly presented Texas to the nation
and the world as a western place. Cattle and cowboys became the new overrid-
ing historical metaphors for Texas iconography….
The mechanisms and methods whereby the public memory of Texas changed
from southern to western during the 1930s form the basis for this essay. Although
some historians, including Campbell along with Walter L. Buenger and Gregg
Cantrell, have called attention to the de-emphasizing of the southern image in
Texans’ collective remembering during the early twentieth century, as early as
the Progressive Era, no scholar has yet studied the process whereby the basic
underpinnings of public memory actually moved to a western frontier orientation.
I contend that this change was rooted in the concept today called “branding,” a
term that was unknown in the years of change that this essay will consider. None-
theless, during the Great Depression decade of the 1930s especially, there was an
explicit effort to remake the popular image of Texas within a western context.
The South had come to be viewed as a benighted region that existed outside the
mainstream of American progress. For example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
unabashedly called the South the nation’s number one economic problem.
For many Americans, things that were southern embodied in basic historical
orientation various retrograde notions that looked to an increasingly irrelevant
past. As Cantrell has reminded us about the shift from southern to western in
the arena of public memory: “By the second decade of the twentieth century
... the sentimentality of the Lost Cause with its reminders of slavery, defeat, mili-
tary occupation, and poverty, held little appeal for the forward-looking leaders
who wanted to build a progressive future for Texas.” The result, he notes, was
that Texas emerged “as a quintessentially western and American state” where
“the dominant public memories … of Texas history continue to be western
symbols,” something that some historians have occasionally overlooked. Leigh
Clemons has also pointed out that this branding of Texas was essentially male-
oriented and racially biased. These efforts to present a new image of Texas had
an “historical emphasis on white, male Texans and the importance of whiteness
in the construction of Texan Cultural identity”.…
The deliberate aspect of this rebranding can be seen, for example, in the activi-
ties for the Texas Centennial Celebration of 1936. As part of those celebratory
activities, the primary objective of which was to present Texas to the nation in a
positive fashion, a number of advertising executives, event organizers, and partici-
pants in the Centennial made concerted efforts to characterize the state as being
western instead of southern. “For the first time in the state’s history,” one student
of the Texas Centennial has written, “its agents developed a national publicity cam-
paign, funded by legislative appropriation and based on its colorful history, romantic
myths, and cultural symbols.” That campaign helped to make Texas “western.”
This branding involved a conscious effort to recast the public memory of
Texas, especially as manifested in popular culture, from southern norms to
western.… What follows in this essay will examine this rebranding of Texas
during the 1930s within the dual context of the intellectual movement of
the decade and also by considering the actual events of the Centennial Cele-
bration. In reality, these two historically distinct aspects of the rebranding
were mutually complementary and can be seen as different aspects of the
same broad based movement. “Those strategies were developed in the years
leading up to the Texas Centennial Celebration of 1936,” as Clemons notes,
18 CHAPTER 1
and “which grew out of an economic crisis that fueled an identity shift in
Texas cultural memory.”…
A shift in scholarly history paralleled the change in public memory. At the
start of the twentieth century, most important Texas historians viewed the state
historically as part of the South. Charles W. Ramsdell of The University of
Texas had successfully established the southern heritage of the state in his teaching,
his publications, and in his professional activities. By the late 1920s, the historio-
graphical orientation of that history department (which in those years had an over-
whelming influence on Texas historiography) began to become increasingly
western. Eugene C. Barker, for example, cast Stephen F. Austin within the con-
text of the westward movement instead of southern expansionism. Walter P.
Webb greatly accelerated this reorientation with his seminal book The Great Plains,
which offered environmental determinism rather than southern heritage as an
important cause of Texas regionalism. As a University of Texas history professor,
Webb had already become concerned that the western heritage of the state had
not been as fully appreciated as it should be. In the mid-1920s, for example, he
helped organize a protest by historians and writers of the West to decry a lack of
full acceptance by eastern book reviewers. Webb’s monumental book Texas Ran-
gers, published the year prior to the centennial celebration, went to great lengths to
present Texas as western. In its pages, Webb adopted a western viewpoint when
he interpreted Texas history as a contest of three civilizations: Native American,
Spanish, and Anglo-American pioneer folk, not southerners.…
The official activities of the Texas Centennial Celebration of 1936 codified,
legitimized, and sanctioned the broad based intellectual changes in Texas view-
points that were already redefining the state as western instead of southern. The
most obvious and best-known aspect of the westernization of the centennial
celebration was found at Fort Worth’s Frontier Exposition, largely promoted
by the expansive Amon G. Carter with the assistance of the New York City
showman Billy Rose.… The western character of the Fort Worth celebration
relentlessly advanced the notion that it was located in the city “where the west
began.” Carter kept the Fort Worth exposition solidly before the state and
nation with a constant emphasis on the western character of Texas. Celebrating
the Texas Centennial as a part of the West, however, was a phenomenon not
limited to Carter at Fort Worth. The idea of the celebration originated in the
1920s among the business leaders and advertising executives of the state, who
viewed the centennial as an opportunity to highlight Texas progress to the rest
of the nation and thus advance the state’s commercial prospects. A number of
centennial offices and agencies thus consciously adopted the viewpoint that
Texas should be characterized in terms of its western heritage, doing so instead
of presenting its southern background.
This was most certainly the case regarding the Centennial Board of Control,
the state entity created by the legislature to oversee the celebration and dispense
the public funds that would underwrite some of its events. The publicity office
of the Board of Control instructed its employees to highlight things western in
the various stories and news items it issued about the centennial. As Centennial
historian Kenneth Ragsdale has noted: “The state’s cultural icons therefore
Courtesy of the Dallas Historical Society
Texas Centennial Exposition Official Souvenir Guide.
Another random document with
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This snuffed out any further assertions by Sam.
In vain the bosun searched aloft; he even shinned on to the skysail
yard, and the fore and main were likewise searched, but without
success.
There were no further utterances of the ghostly voice, and the matter
remained an unexplained mystery.
Black Davis and the bosun did their best to thrash the matter out, but
at last gave it up as hopeless.
"Must a' been some one foolin' on deck," suggested the bosun.
"But the voice came from aloft, man; the whole watch was hyeh with
me. It weren't none er my crowd; I'll lay a hundred dollars thar's none
o' them got the nerve to go monkeyin' with me like that," replied the
mate impatiently.
"An' there ain't no parrot aboard. Well, it beats all my goin' to sea,"
muttered the other. "My crowd was all in the foc's'le 'cept Derringer,
who was doin' a doss on deck, an' I see'd him standin' in your mob
as I come along aft."
"Wall, then, if he was with my crowd o' hoodlums, it couldn't ha' been
him, though if thar's any deadbeat aboard who's got the cheek ter do
it, it's thet durned Britisher."
A curious grim smile appeared on Jack's face as his sharp ears
caught the mate's remark.
Like the others, he had been awakened by the first groan.
As it ceased he heard a long-drawn breath, and looking round, spied
the small white face of the ship's boy, outlined by the moonlight, as
he crouched up against the mast behind the pump wheel.
Even as he watched he saw the small mouth open, at the same
moment the groan broke out again, apparently by the midshiphouse.
Silently Jack gazed, marvelling. No sound seemed to come from the
boy, but as the groan ceased his mouth closed, and he drew a long
breath.
"Well, I'm jiggered," muttered Jack to himself. "The boy's a
ventriloquist, and a wonderful one at that."
Then the kid threw his voice into the mizzen-top, and the words
which had caused such consternation burst forth.
This time his mouth was nearly closed, and only a very keen
observer could have detected any movement in his lips.
"Great Harry! If Black Davis were to catch the nipper at that game
he'd kill him," mused Jack; and thinking that the performance had
gone quite far enough, he drew himself under the fife-rail with the
silence of a stalking Apache, and then suddenly pounced on the boy,
clapping one hand over his mouth to prevent any cry of alarm.
"Hush, not a sound!" he hissed, as he took his hand from the kid's
mouth.
"Don't split on me, Derringer, don't split on me. I'll never do it again,
so help me bob," half blubbered the terrified urchin.
"Honest Injun?" inquired Jack.
"Honest Injun!" repeated the boy.
"Well, I'll pull you through this time; but don't breathe a word of this to
another soul aboard," said Jack softly.
"Be sure I won't," whimpered the kid.
"Right! Now we've got to slip into that crowd there without them
spotting that we've not been there the whole time; savvy, youngster?
Keep your pecker up and mum's the word," whispered the rover.
"Hang me, but the lad's got nerve, and I like the look of him, too," he
thought, as the pair of them stealthily joined the group of scared
men.
"What's your name, kid?" asked Jack in an undertone, whilst the
bosun was searching aloft.
"Jim," replied the boy; "I don't remember ever havin' no other."
"Where do you come from?"
"London. Fust thing I can remember was sleepin' in the parks; my,
but it were cold sometimes."
"Got no father or mother?"
"No, I didn't have nobody; I wos just a street arab afore I went to
sea."
"And how long have you been at sea, sonny?"
"Four year!"
"Pretty rough, eh?"
"Yes, mos' times, but I'm hard," replied the plucky boy.
"Well, see here, Jim," said the rover, gripping the boy's hand in his
strong grasp. "I'm your friend from now on, and just you come to me
when there's any trouble; savvy? Now you'd better skip along and
strike 'one bell.'"
With tears in his eyes the boy stuttered his thanks before hurrying off
to his time-keeping, and as he went he skipped along the deck for
joy. His sad little heart had seldom known a kindness, and he had
grown accustomed to bearing the hardships of his lot with a sullen
apathy; but this offer of friendship and the protection of a strong right
arm, coming as it did from the cock of the foc's'le, seemed almost
too great a bit of luck to be true.
The boy felt a buoyancy within him which refused to be kept down,
and his rising spirits, manifesting themselves in an attempted
rendering of the hornpipe, all but brought him foul of the mate's
heavy toe.
The excitement caused by the strange incidents of the middle watch
sank all grievances for the time being. Like all deep-water men, the
events which had put murder into their hearts one day were forgotten
the next.
No longer did that sea-lawyer, Studpoker Bob, find an eager
audience! Instead, authorities on ghosts and mysterious voices, such
as Sam, gained the whole attention of the wildly superstitious crowd.
On coming on deck for the forenoon watch the mate made a visit to
the bosun's locker.
He discovered the Chilian sullenly indifferent and serenely calm. The
weird voices of the night did not seem to have troubled the man, or
even aroused his curiosity, and he swallowed down hungrily the
rough breakfast which the Chinese cook placed before him; after
which he was released from the corpse, which was hastily sewn up
in canvas, and, with half a dozen worn-out sheaves made fast to the
feet, launched overboard.
No service was read over the body, for, as Captain Riley remarked to
his second-in-command,
"In the fust place, I ain't got no doggoned prayer-book; an' in the
second, I callate that Barker'll reach whatever port he's bound for
quick enough, prayers or no prayers."
As the body took its dive, all hands rushed to the rail.
"So long, ye devil's spawn, a fair wind down under to ye. I guess
they've their heatin' plant all fixed for ye," muttered Red Bill, of the
broken arm.
"Solitary confinement on bread and water," was the old man's order
re Pedro.
He was handcuffed, his donkey's breakfast and a blanket were
tossed in to him, then the door was locked, and he was left to brood
in semi-darkness, the only light being that which glinted through the
ventilator in the door.
CHAPTER VI
"THE FATAL RED LEAD"
The trades failed close to the line, and all the troubles and trials of
the doldrums began. They were a fine opportunity for Black Davis to
take the steam out of his watch, for the wind, when there was any,
came in short puffs from every quarter of the compass, and never
blew for more than an hour or two in any given direction.
"Weather crossjack brace!" was the continual cry, and at night on the
advent of each black squall there was a roar of:
"Stand by your skysail halliards!"
At one moment the rain would be coming down like a waterspout
until the scuppers were full, and the next minute the wet ship would
be glistening in the sunshine.
For five days the Higgins did not average twenty miles a day, and the
whole of one baking Sunday she swung idly on her heel in the
clutches of a Paddy's hurricane, whilst a stick of wood floating at her
side would be sometimes ahead, sometimes astern.
Several of the men in their day watches below fished indefatigably
from the jibboom, and Broncho soon had his first taste of albacore.
The flying-fish attracted him immensely, and he seemed never to tire
of watching them as they flashed in and out of the water in glittering
streaks of silver.
"I allows them fish has a high an' lavish time of it, a-pirootin' round
permiscuous that-away. I shore wonders it don't exhaust them none,
the way they hustles around," observed the cowboy to Jack
Derringer, as they reclined lazily on the foc's'le head one afternoon
watch below.
"A good time? Not much! Why, the albacore and bonita chase them
out of the water, and the bosun-birds swoop down upon them in the
air; they spend all their time flying from one enemy into the clutches
of another."
"You don't say? It's shore some mean the way Providence cold-
decks them fish that-away; yet they seem plenty numerous,
notwithstandin' the way they're up agin the iron," drawled Broncho,
as he slowly cut up some tobacco and refilled his corncob.
When within a few miles of the line the Higgins was put about for the
first time.
This piece of seamanship was not executed without a vast amount of
belaying-pin soup, even Broncho, the notorious desperado, getting
his share in the heat of the moment.
The crew were raw and undrilled, and soon were worried into a
hopeless tangle.
As the bosun had to attend to the crossjack and main braces in
charge of the starboard watch, Jack was placed in command on the
foc's'le, with Hank and Pat to aid him. This post is always reserved
for the best men in the ship, for in a fresh breeze the men on the
foc's'le have a most lively time.
From the moment that the helm was put down, the ship was in an
indescribable uproar. The maindeck, littered with ropes'-ends, coils
of braces, and handspikes, was soon in hopeless confusion. Braces
jammed, tackles got foul, and the men ran aimlessly about, chased
by Black Davis, who, like an avenging demon, was swearing as only
a ship's mate can swear, whilst he fairly surpassed himself with his
fist and boot work.
At the break of the poop the old man almost foamed at the mouth
with fury. With clenched fists he raged up and down, roaring like a
bull.
"Let go them royal an' skysail braces, yew mongrel rip thar, what in
hell'r yew doin' of? Gol darn my etarnal skin if ever I see'd sech a
inseck. Neow y've gone an' fouled thet brace! Snakes, yew ain't
more use than a lot o' cawpses. Hyeh, bosun! Jump across an'
thump thet hayseed, will yew?"
At the critical moment Sam, at the wheel, nearly had the ship in
irons.
With one rush the old man was upon him.
"What in thunder air yew doin'? Y'll have her aback in a second, yew
durned, sooty-faced heathen!"
And he gave the darkey a cuff on the side of the head which would
have sent him to the deck if he had not clung to the wheel.
At last the yards were braced up on the other tack and the old man
went below. Whilst the port watch cleared up the decks, the other
retired to repair damages.
"I shore thinks I've been in some elegant skirmishes afore now,"
remarked Broncho, as he felt himself over for breakages in the
foc's'le; "but I'm an Apache if I'm ever into a fight that's more stirrin'
an' eventful, not to say toomultuous. At one time I'm that tangled up
in my rope I allows it's a whirlwind."
"I believe you, my bye," said the cockney, as he limped painfully
across to the water-barrel for a drink. "I drors h'it mild when h'I sez
it's chucks ahead of a bloomin' 'urricane."
"And you calls the play kerrect, Hollins. What with that old he-wolf a-
howlin' in a mighty unmelodious way on the poop, an' Black Davis a-
swarmin' all over me like a wild-cat, I shore reckons it's a heap
thrillin'. Them two sports throws no end of sperit into their play."
"And thet ain't fosterin' no delusions; they're hot stuff, pard, an' they
earns their reputations," said Bedrock Ben. "That 'ere Black Davis
jumps me offen my mental reservation complete every time."
"When he gets a ship he ought to make a most successful master, if
his training goes for anything," put in Curly. "I notice all the American
deep-water skippers have the reputation of having been regular
Western Ocean buckos in their time."
"That bloomin' roustabout'll never live to command a ship," grunted
Red Bill from the opposite bunk. "He's too successful with his fists to
live long. He'll get cut up one o' these days, like that other New
Jersey tough."
"Yes, success isn't all jam," remarked Jack slowly. "It's got a
remarkable habit of turning sour in your mouth, just as you are
beginning to put on frills and throw out your chest."
"Them remyarks o' yours is shore wisdom, Jack," drawled Broncho
in his musical Texan, as he blew a cloud of tobacco-smoke slowly
through his nose. "What you-alls calls success don't always pan out
so rich as you calculated it would. Often the kyards stacks up mighty
contrary, an' when you're just about callin' for drinks round, blandly
surmisin' in your sublime ignorance that you makes a winnin' an' is
shore due to scoop the pot, that 'ere gent 'Providence,' who's sittin'
some quiet an' unobstrusive whilst you raises the bet to the limit, just
steps in an' calls your hand. Then it is that your full house goes down
like an avalanche before his four of a kind, an' you, some sore an'
chagrined, meanders off an' ponders on this vale of tears."
"You're some long-winded, Broncho," said old Ben Sluice, "but you're
dead right. I've seen a hell's slew o' minin' pards go under just 'coss
they'd struck it rich. They rakes in their dinero an' away they goes,
playin' it high an' standin' the crowd, all the time a-consumin' o'
nosepaint unlimited; an' the next thing you knows is they done
jumped the track."
"H'I knew a real bang-up toff once," joined in the cockney. "'E wos a
genelman, too, boiled shirt, shiny pants an' h'all, an' a dead smooth
job 'e 'ad—just raked in the quids for doin' nuffin' but loaf 'round.
You've all 'eard of the Scotch 'Ouse—leastways, h'any that's been to
the little village h'I come from. Well, 'e was wot they calls
'shopwalker' there. H'I goes in there one day (h'I'd got a big payday
comin', an' h'I thinks, thinks h'I, I'll be cute this time an' lay in a bang-
up outfit). Well, h'in I goes an' h'up 'e comes as h'affable an' perlite
as you please an' sez:
"'And what's yours, sir?'
"Well, h'I wos h'all took aback, gettin' sich a question from a puffect
stranger. At last h'I stammers out:
"''Arf-an'-'arf, an' thank ye kindly, mister.'
"Well, 'e just smiles superior-loike, an' sez,
"'I mean, what do you want to buy?'
"Well, I thinks to myself, 'That's comin' it low on a chap.' It weren't the
friendly touch, wos h'it? But h'I don' sye nuffin' 'bout it, but gets a rig-
out an' skips.
"Next v'yage h'I comes into the West Indy Docks. I thinks as h'I loafs
round, mebbe I'll go an' see if my rorty toff is still on top. Well, 'e ain't
there, so I asts the cove wot I bought the duds from, when did 'e cut
'is 'ook? Well, wot d'you think, byes: 'e'd been an' committed
sooicide. Stroike me good an' blind, but you could a' knocked me
down wiv a feaver when I 'ears it."
"What's a dead cinch to one gent is jest an ornery layout to another,"
commented Broncho.
"I allows that 'shopwalker' o' yours don't accoomilate no joys from his
duties. Mebbe he reckons them mighty low, not to say debasin', an'
finally he gets that fretful an' peevish he jest throws up his deal in
disgust, jumps on his war-pony, an' lights out on the death trail."
And now a pitiful incident occurred. That poor ship's drudge, the kid,
with the exception of Jack Derringer, who was in the other watch,
had but one friend and chum, which was the almost equally
disreputable ship's cat—a gaunt, thin tabby.
These two shared their blankets and shared their grub. Scanty as
the fare was, the kid always saved enough out of his daily whack to
give the cat a good square meal.
As Broncho remarked,
"It's shore an example to humanity, the way that 'ere despised an'
put-upon urchin hugs an' cherishes that cat; it's plumb touchin' as a
spectacle."
Since the mysterious voice episode, Jack's friendliness with the
ragged boy had caused some comment in the foc's'le.
Often these two were to be seen seated together talking in the
second dog-watch. A notable change was beginning to show itself in
the small urchin. He was no longer the dirty ragamuffin of yore; his
shrill speech was not so full of oaths, and he ceased to shirk his
work whenever he could conveniently do so.
The rolling-stone seemed to possess a wonderful influence over the
boy, and in the dog-watch he grew into the way of giving the kid a
short lecture.
These strange lectures proved a wonderful education to the
suppressed urchin, who drank in every word of them.
"Jim," the rover would say, as he smoked lazily on the fore-hatch,
"your language is a sight too foul for a kid of your age. You just take
a turn with that small tongue of yours, and go easy on swearing. I
know it's hard, specially at sea, but I'll give you a tip. Now you've
seen the Spanish inscriptions on cigar-boxes, haven't you? Yes?
Well, suppose something happens—you stub your toe over a ring-
bolt, or slip up on some slush by the galley—you want a harmless,
inoffensive word to express your feelings. Well, there's your word in
top-weight Spanish on the cigar-box. 'Claro!' you say, short and
quick in an annoyed way, 'Claro!' Well, you do it again; this time
you're feeling a bit hotter, and you want something the least bit
stronger. 'Maduro!' you say, and put your feeling into the 'u.' But you
go and stub your toe a third time; it's getting to be a bad habit of
yours, and you really want something strong this time to get the
proper flavour in your mouth. There's the word ready for you on the
cigar-box. 'Colorado!' and the worse you feel the more you roll the 'r,'
until you can make the word howl with pain. Listen——"
Jack frowned ferociously, and then from the back of his throat threw
out the terrible oath:
"Color-r-r-r-a-a-a-do!!!"
The rolling-stone's lectures were certainly original, to say the least of
them, and they generally had their amusing side.
One Saturday night Jack lay on his back watching his beloved stars,
whilst the boy was busy at the pump washing off his weekly
allowance of dirt in preparation for Sunday.
This was a new habit of his, set going by his star-gazing friend, who,
finding that the boy did not possess any soap, had presented him
with a dozen pieces, saying,
"Jim, here's some soap for you. If there's any of it left by the time
we're in the North Atlantic, there'll be trouble."
As the boy finished his toilet the rover called to him, and pointing
upwards, said:
"Do you see that star, Jim? That's 'Aldebaran,' the eye of Taurus, the
bull, the second sign of the zodiac. Doesn't he shine plain? He's
easy to see, isn't he? But suppose he was all coal-dust and dirt! We
shouldn't be able to see him, should we? In the same way, if you're
all dirty and covered with coal-dust, instead of being well polished by
soap and water, how do you expect your guardian angel to watch
over you? Why, he'd lose you amongst all the other specks of dirt on
this earth, and never find you again; then you'd be an easy thing for
the old gentleman with a forked tail, eh, sonny?"
"I'm afeard then, Jack, my guardian angel ain't never see'd me since
I was born, for I don' ever remember bein' clean 'ceptin' lately," said
the boy mournfully.
"Well, cheer up, old son! I expect he's got his eye on you all right all
the same," declared the other heartily, alarmed by the seriousness
with which Jim took his remarks.
Then, searching round for an idea whereby to soften his statements,
he spied Sam.
"Don't you be down-hearted, Jim," he went on. "Look at Sam. How
would you expect his guardian angel to see him? Yet he does,
notwithstanding his colour."
"But Sam do shine be-e-autiful when he's hot," declared the boy.
This last was too much for Jack; he lay back and roared, whilst Jim's
big brown eyes watched him in wonder.
But the men forward were rather huffed by Jack's friendship with the
boy.
"Fust time h'I ever see'd the cock o' the foc's'le pal up with the ship's
boy," grunted the cockney one day.
"You just be keerful what you say, Hollins," said Red Bill. "I just gave
the little nipper a clout on the jaw t'other day for giving me sauce,
when up jumps Derringer.
"'Leave that kid alone,' sezzee.
"'Mind yer own bloomin' bizness,' sez I; an' before I knows where I
am, I'm lyin' on my back on the deck with a bump the size of a two-
sheave block on the side of my head."
"'E calls 'im Jim, too," went on the scandalised cockney. "Might be
bruvers, the way Jack spiles 'im. Kids want kickin'—h'it's the on'y
way ter teach 'em."
But to return to the cat.
It was close on eight bells in the afternoon watch. The Higgins lay
rolling in a heavy swell, with her courses hauled up; the sun was
obscured, and heavy rain-clouds hung over the horizon.
There was not the slightest breath of wind, and the ship echoed with
the slating and flogging of her sails as she rolled.
A continuous stream of water gushed in through her ports, and
poured in a cascade first one way and then the other across the
maindeck.
The port watch were on deck, busy "sand and canvassing" the main
and fore fife-rails, preparatory to revarnishing.
The fore-hatch had just been chipped, and was resplendent in bright
patches of red lead. The fates were rapidly arranging a holocaust for
poor puss, for, as if obeying some unseen hand, he suddenly roused
and stretched himself where he had been coiled up asleep on the
foc's'le head; then, with the slow, graceful movement of his tribe, he
descended the ladder and deliberately went up and rubbed himself
against the fore-hatch. But alas! the eagle eye of Black Davis was
upon him, and the red lead betrayed him, for it had left its marks
upon his brindled coat; too late he tried to lick it off.
"Terantulars, yew dirty sneakin' beast. Rub my paint off, would yew?"
roared the mate.
With remarkable swiftness he clutched poor puss in his iron fist, and
a second later the cat was adrift on the swell and hidden from sight.
With a scream of fury and distress, the kid, who had been at work on
the fore fife-rail, flung himself upon the bully, biting, kicking, and
scratching.
Broken words burst from his mouth in a torrent, and, Jack's lecture
forgotten, he raved and swore as only a boy bred to the sea can
swear, raining a very shower of blows with his little fists upon the big
mate.
Catching him by the scruff of his neck, Black Davis flung him aside.
The poor boy was hurled across the deck, to be brought up by the
iron combing of the hatch, which caught him upon the left brow as he
fell.
Jim dropped stunned, and lay motionless, bleeding copiously, whilst
the fatal red lead with sardonic irony smeared itself in mockery upon
his cheek and shoulder.
There was a low growl of suppressed anger from the watch, and if
looks could have killed, Black Davis would not have lived long.
"Git on with your work, yew scrapin's o' hell, or I'll soon knock the
bile out o' your gizzards," he roared; then, walking up to the
senseless body of the boy, he kicked it twice heavily on the ribs.
"No shamming, yew little devil! Up yew get, or I'll make yew smell
hell."
But before he could lift his foot again the stalwart form of the rolling-
stone stood between the mate and his victim.
"Drop that, you d——d child-murderer! Come on and hit a man your
own size."
The words fairly hissed from Jack's firm mouth, and there was a devil
in his flashing eyes no one on board had ever seen there before.
Planted lightly but firmly on his legs, he squared up to the bucko with
clenched fists and furious, quivering lips.
"Come on!" he raged, taking a step forward. "Come on, you devil!"
The port watch stared, open-mouthed, half expecting the heavens to
fall in their amazement at Jack's daring.
Black Davis's glance fell before the fury of Jack's eyes. His big fist,
half-raised, dropped to his side again; he took a step backward,
then, muttering something indistinctly between his teeth, he slowly
turned on his heel and walked aft.
Jack stared, the anger in his eyes changing to a look of blank
surprise.
"Well, I'm blowed!" he muttered.
A half-muffled cheer broke from the port watch and many of the
starboard who had jumped from their bunks in anticipation of a royal
set-to.
The rover turned and snapped out,
"Fetch a bucket of water, one of you."
A dozen men rushed to obey.
Bending over the senseless urchin, Jack gently wiped the blood and
red lead from the little white face; then, with the tenderness of a
woman, he picked the boy up in his arms and carried him to his
bunk.
There he skilfully doctored the long cut on the boy's forehead, first
washing it, and then drawing the edges together with sticking-plaister
zigzagged across it, whilst the starboard watch looked on in
admiration of his handiwork.
Luckily for the poor little waif, his short life of hardship and want had
so toughened him that, with the exception of a bad bruise, his ribs
were intact.
"Poor old Dandy!" were the first words the kid spoke after coming to,
and the tears rushed to his eyes as the lonely feeling of his loss
came over him.
"Never mind the cat, sonny. I reckon Jack Derringer's done saved
your life; if it hadn't been for Jack, you'd a' been hittin' the trail after
Dandy yourself," said old Bedrock Ben.
"And that ain't no bloomin' josh. Jack put the skybosh on the 'ulkin'
bully, and no mistyke. Crikey, if it weren't the 'ighest old rig to see
Black Davis spifflicated.
"''Ow's that, umpire?' sez I.
"'W'y, h'out, er course!' and away walks 'is bloomin' lordship, fairly
'oodooed."
Thus the cockney, with a chuckle of delight.
"Did Derringer save me from the mate? I don' remember nothink.
Black Davis slugged me, didn't he?" the boy asked faintly.
"If standing up between the mate an' you lying senseless, and daring
Black Davis to touch you, isn't saving you, I don't know what is," said
Curly hotly.
"Oh, shut up, you fellows, and leave the boy alone," growled Jack.
"It's just eight bells, and Jim's going to lie quiet and get some sleep.
"Do you hear that, Jim?" he continued; "you're not to stir from your
bunk till I give you leave. Green'll do your 'peggy' for you, eh,
Green?"
The man nodded nervously in assent.
"That's bueno! Now shut your eyes, sonny, and take a siesta."
The boy's brown eyes glowed with a wealth of gratitude and a dog-
like look of adoration as they rested upon Jack's stalwart figure; but
the rolling-stone was a martinet of a doctor—not a word would he
allow above a whisper in the foc's'le until the kid was asleep.
It was the cockney's wheel when the watch changed, and at four
bells, six o'clock, he came forward, his face eloquent with news.
"H'I've found 'im out, byes, h'I've found 'im out!" he shouted
incoherently to the group of men seated yarning on the fore-hatch
and spare spars, and he pointed wildly at the rolling-stone.
"What's he done now?" rumbled half a dozen deep voices.
"Wyte, me bloomin' ole shellbacks, lemme tell the yarn."
"Well, pipe ahead; we ain't stoppin' ye," growled Red Bill.
"Jack," said the cockney, suddenly darting upon the rover—"Jack,
me bloomin' lovy-duck, does you know w'y Black Dyvis wouldn't stan'
up to yer?"
"Maybe I do, maybe I don't," laughed Jack.
"Well, h'I do, then, so now. I 'eard the ole man spin the bosun the
whole blessed yarn; an' believe me, byes, h'I wos that tickled to
death, before I knoo where h'I wos the bally 'ooker wos two p'ints off
'er course."
"Heave ahead, mate, heave ahead; you're all aback. Swing yer fore-
yards an' get sail on to yer yarn," broke in the impatient Red Bill
again.
"Orl right, cocky, orl right. Dye yer 'air. That red 'ead o' yours mykes
ye in sich a blawsted 'urry, you'll get jumpin' inter yer coffin one fyne
dye afore ye're dead."
There was a laugh, for Red Bill was notoriously hasty and impulsive
in his actions.
"Well," began the cockney impressively, "h'it were this wye. The
bosun wos a-leanin' agin the rail to windward er-scannin' o' things in
general, an' allowin' mebbe 'e'd take a pull on the weather braces,
w'en h'up comes the ole man from 'is grub. 'E goes over to ther
bosun an' 'e sez:
"'What sort of er'and is that man Derringer?'
"'Best man wiv a marlin-spike h'I've see'd fer a long time,' sez the
bosun.
"'Well,' goes on the ole man, speakin' slow an' solemn-loike, ''es the
man as did up Slocum on the I.D. Macgregor!'
"Byes, h'I could er dropped. Slocum, mind you, the bigges'-fisted
lump of a two 'undred an' fifty pound bucko sailin' the seas—the man
as can 'old a six-foot Noo Orleans buck nigger, one in each 'and, lift
'em off the deck, an' bash their ugly black 'eads together; h'I've see'd
'im do it——"
"That's so, mate," broke in Hank. "I were in Iquique wi' him when he
killed er man—picked him up an' kind er bumped 'im agin the boat
skids an' broke his head; the ole man put some lie in the log, an'
there weren't no more heard of it."
"Well," continued the cockney, "the skipper 'e spins the bosun the
yarn, an' h'I jest absorbs h'it likewise. Seems Cappen Summers told
'im 'bout it, an' 'e spots you, Jack, from them tattoo-marks o' yourn.
"Well, byes, this ere grinnin' cuckoo 'ere, 'om I'm pra'd to shipmytes
wiv, 'e 'as words or somethin' wiv Mister Bucko Slocum, syme wye
mebbe as 'e 'ad wi' Dyvis, an' they ups an' 'as it out.
"Well, they fit an' fit an' fit, Cappen Summers an' the 'ole bloomin'
ship's comp'ny er-lookin' on. My crikey, but it must er been the
'ighest ole rig! Fer two hours they fit by ole man Summers' ticker, till
they wos h'all blood an' rags. Then Jack, 'e up wiv 'is fist an' lets
drive. Oh Lord! Weren't it er knock-out! That swot Slocum, 'e just
flies back'ards, lands on 'is 'ead on the quarter-bitts, an' lays there,
reglar broke up; didn't come to till nex' mornin'.
"Ole man Summers tho't 'e were killed, an' gives Jack 'is job on ther
spot.
"That's w'y Dyvis weren't 'avin' none!" concluded the cockney
solemnly.
"'Sthat true, Jack, 'sthat true?" shouted half a dozen voices.
"Better ask the old man," laughed the rover.
In a moment Jack was circled by a crowd of eager men, all bawling
at once.
"Lord lummy, Jack, you must be a bruiser," called one.
"Did Black Davis know this, d'you suppose?" asked Curly.
"'Course 'e did, you h'ass!" cried the cockney scornfully. "W'y, 'e ain't
put a finger on 'im th'ole passage, not even towin' out."
"I reckon Black Davis was some scared he'd lose his job if Jack
downs him, same as that other fire-eatin' miscreant," mused
Broncho. "No, he were dead agin playin' your hand, Jack; he weren't
hankerin' to be your beef—he's too keerful of his skin that away."
"Gaud blimy! Wot er scrap h'it would er been," lamented the
cockney.
"It shore would ha' been some lurid, but I pities the mate. He was
due to emerge a totterin' wreck. Jack was just a-moanin' for blood
an' oozin' with f'rocity," asserted the cowpuncher.
"He did look a heap grim," remarked Bedrock Ben.
"But what if Black Davis had downed him?" inquired Pinto.
"Sich thoughts is figments," said Broncho contemptuously. "I'm
puttin' up chips Jack'd have that rancorous hold-up too dead to skin.
Jack weren't aimin' to put no delicacy into his play, that time."
"Green, if you don't tcha-tcha[6] and strike eight bells, you'll have the
mate on your trail," broke in the bucko-downer, anxious to cut short
the conversation.
And a few moments later the silvery note of the bell announced that
the first watch had begun.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Tcha-tcha, "hurry up" (Zulu).
CHAPTER VII
"IN THE SECOND DOG-WATCH"
All through the tropics, Pedro, under the influence of his solitary
confinement, had been becoming more and more morose and
despondent.
He hardly touched the wretched fare which was placed before him,
and had wasted to a shadow of his former self.
His fierce black eyes glittered out of a sallow, heavily-lined face,
upon which the lowering scowl daily became deeper and deeper.
His ragged moustache was broken and torn by chewing, whilst his
lower lip hung sore and bleeding from the constant gnawing of his
teeth.
"It's a cert," remarked Broncho, "that that bowie-whirlin' dago is due
to go flutterin' from his limb one o' these days. He's lookin' 'bout
ready to break camp for the etarnal beyond; his vittles no longer
gives him joy, an' he just sets thar an' wilts."
"Weevily hard tack and dirty warm water wouldn't give anybody joy,"
replied Jack. "He wants air and exercise; they should let him out for
an hour on deck every day."
"Gate an' seat checks for the realms o' light is about what he wants, I
reckon," retorted the cattle-ranger.
And Broncho was right. One morning they found him too late; he was
lying in a pool of blood with a small piece of broken wood in his
clenched fingers. With this poor weapon the Chilian had managed to
tear open a vein in his arm, and so bled to death. Thus miserably
ended the poor little bucko-killer.
His death brought the superstitious members of the crew to the front
again. Pessimistically they prophesied all sorts of evils, and Sam, the
chief authority, openly proclaimed that Black Davis, with the death of
the ship's cat upon his soul, would be the next victim of the ghostly
avenger.
In the south-east trades easy times reigned in the starboard watch.
For nearly a week not a sheet, brace, or halliard was touched,
except for the usual pull on the braces and general "freshening of
the nip" every evening.
In the second dog-watch the men would collect on the foc's'le head,
and exchange yarns with eager faces and vehement gestures.
Every man forward had seen life in its more unusual phases. Paddy,
Hank, Jack, and the cockney had all been shipwrecked more than
once; and even Jim had had a strange crop of experiences crowded
into his short life.
One evening Jack had just related a yarn of how he had been
wounded in an affray in the New Hebrides, when mate of a
"blackbirder," as the schooners recruiting Kanaka labour for the
Queensland plantations were called.
"Any money in thet layout?" inquired the gambler.
"Used to be," returned Jack, "till the missionaries and opposition in
Australia broke it up."
"Thar's many a cinch in the South Seas," observed Hank. "Copra an'
curios ain't bad, nor yet pearls, speshully if yew kin strike a
preserved patch when thar ain't no gunboat knockin' around."
"Smuggling opium's good, too," reflected Jack musingly.
"Yew bet! Ever tried it?"
"Aye."
"How did it pan out?" inquired Bedrock Ben, somewhat eagerly.
"So-so!" grunted the rover. "Did three good trips. Then we got caught
napping in a typhoon, and the old junk went to the bottom."
"Close call, eh?"
"Yes; only three of us saved—two Chins and myself."

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Allitt, Major Problems in American Religious History, 2nd ed., 2013

Chapter 1 Enduring Myths and the Land 1

Chapter 2 Contested Empires: The Native Americans of

Juliana Barr • An Indian Language of Politics in the Land of the

Chapter 3 The Challenges of Spanish Colonization: Struggles

Chapter 4 Populating Texas During the Mexican Era,

7. Stephen F. Austin Explains the Reasons for His Arrest by

Chapter 5 Rebellion in Texas, 1835–1836 121

Chapter 6 From Fragile Republic to Statehood 152

4. Mirabeau Lamar Threatens War Against the Cherokees,

Chapter 7 Changing Gender Roles on the Texas

Chapter 8 Slavery, Secession and Civil War, 1861–1865 225

Chapter 9 Race, Politics, and Reconstruction,

Chapter 10 Conquering and Populating the Frontiers,

Chapter 11 Suffrage and Beyond: Texas Women and Reform,

Chapter 12 Oil, Industrialization, and Urbanization,

6. Texans Tell Reporter Edward T. Devine That Some of “the

Chapter 13 Defining Mexican-American Identity in Texas,

Mario T. García • LULAC, Mexican American Identity, and Civil

Chapter 14 The African American Struggle for Civil Rights in

Chapter 15 The Rise of the Republican Party and the

4. The Democrats “Last Whimper:” The Texas Monthly Assesses

Chapter 16 Epilogue: Into the 21st Century 477

scholarship. Furthermore, as the Texas population has grown, regional historical

the obstacles Spain encountered in its attempts to establish a permanent presence

SAM W. HAYNES is a professor of History and direc-

CARY D. WINTZ is the Distinguished Professor of His-

Enduring Myths and the Land

Texas and the South

evolved over time in an intricate, often contradictory pattern, let me expand on

in downtown Austin in 1911, paintings of his ranches graced the lobby. At

TABLE 1 Number of Texans Lynched by Race and Ethnicity

1880s 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s

the exclusion and segregation of Mexican Texans. As Richard Flores recently

Texas: Where the West Begins

sometimes resembles a lumbering Atlas shouldering the unwieldy burden of mul-

The Rebranding of Texas During the 1936 Centennial

solidly on the side of southern heritage as the primary historical underpinning of

Courtesy of the Dallas Historical Society

Texas Centennial Exposition Official Souvenir Guide.

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