Trammel's Trace: The First Road to Texas from the North by Gary L. Pinkerton (review)

Gary L. Pinkerton undertakes two ambitious tasks with Trammel' s Trace: The First Road to Texas from the North: writing a history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Arkansas-Louisiana-Texas frontier while developing a biography of the route's namesake, Nicholas Trammell. Both are very welcome additions to the historiography of the Old Southwest, and one hopes this book spurs more work on the region.

Pinkerton begins by establishing his connections to Trammel's Trace, which are deep and personal, as he grew up with one of its beds running through his family's property. He and his fellow "'rut nuts'" spent years seeking out the remaining portions of the road (p. xii). Pinkerton's second chapter recounts where the road ran, the kinds of terrain it traversed, and where Trammel's Trace might still be seen.

After this orientation, Pinkerton tracks back and forth between Nicholas Trammell and the region and communities through which his trace ran. Pinkerton shows us a land, largely bereft of law and order, where smugglers, brigands, and other American, French, and Spanish ne'er-do-wells thronged. Trammell and his family, by some accounts, would have been numbered among them. Pinkerton portrays the region as a forerunner to the Wild West of later generations, a period that ended as state power grew with the influx of farmers and other, more settled peoples. The account takes an American viewpoint, which aids in melding the work with other research on the region, but the same context would be understood much differently from Spanish or Native perspectives.

Trammell himself, of course, looms large in the account. Born and raised in Tennessee, Trammell appeared deeply committed to exercising the personal prerogative of one in charge of his surroundings. Though clearly not someone to be trifled with, Trammell may have been more complex than stereotypes of the antebellum white man would suggest. The author offers that Trammell was once brought into court in Texas after he broke an enslaved African American man from chained confinement and sheltered him at his ferry. Rather than acknowledge the incident as theft of property, Trammell surrendered his horse and gun, both items of great prestige for American frontiersmen. Far from being an abolitionist, Trammell does appear to have had what Pinkerton describes as a strong "sense of frontier fairness" that extended to the enslaved as well as the free (p. 125).

Though Pinkerton never deals with the issue directly, it is striking how connected even the earliest European Americans in the Louisiana-Arkansas-Texas corridor were to capitalist market economies. Much of the depredation perpetrated by Trammell and his fellow smugglers focused on capturing mustangs from the Texas prairies and funneling them into eastern markets. These smuggling routes were also used to carry on clandestine trade between European-aligned economies across the Texas border, exchanges that the Spanish government tried but failed to curtail. Though far from the structures of the eastern seaboard, the region that Trammel's Trace cut through was never far from that economy.

I recommend this book to historians interested in early-nineteenth-century Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, the Southwest, or frontier history. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists interested in frontier theory will also find it engaging. Though he covers a lot of ground, Pinkerton writes in a style that will maintain the interest of the nonspecialist.