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2 Texas and Oklahoma Texas, the earliest western region settled by Anglos, is also where women ’s western books begin. Mary Austin Holley, a cousin of Stephen Austin the Texas impresario, was a widow from New England governessing in Lexington, Kentucky. She bought land in Austin’s colony and wrote to publicize it in hope of selling her holdings at a profit. Her two books, both called Notes on Texas (1833, 1836), already display what came to be typical themes in women’s western writing. First, the attractions of the country for settlement; second, a description of the traits needed for success on the social margins; third, celebration of a pioneering kinsman (rarely, kinswoman); fourth, the region’s particular advantages and challenges for women; and, in 1836, the Anglo Saxon mission of taking over the territory. The 1833book (reissued with an introduction by Marilyn McAdams Sibley in 1985),consists of impressionistic and flowery travel letters describing Texas as a settler’s dream. Texas is “adapted, beyond most lands, both to delight the senses, and enrich the pockets, of those, who are disposed to accept of its bounties” (10); her “most sanguine impressions of the natural advantages of the country, both with regard to the salubrity of the climate, the fertility of the soil, and the facility with which the lands can be brought under cultivation, were confirmed” (12). The best settler would be one whose “hopes of rising to independence in life, by honourable exertion, have been blasted by disappointment . . . who does not hanker after society, nor sigh after the vanished illusions of life; who has a fund of resources within himself, and a heart to trust in God and his own exertions . . . who is not peculiarly sensitive to petty inconveniences” (130–31).Although Holley’s implied audience of honest toilers have not succeeded where they are, this is not because of an inherent character defect. Almost to the contrary, they are failing because their simple honesty unfits them for success in a complex and sophisticated society. In a place where they may start over, and so long as their expectations are in line with reality, they may bring into being a new and better society then the one they leave behind. In 1833she tells readers not to worry that Texas is a Mexican province, but to reject politics and attend to the business of settling. Mexico City is far away, and the government has turned over territorial development to men like Stephen Austin, an example of the “hardy and bold pioneer, braving all the dangers of a wilderness infested with hostile Indians, far out of the reach of civilized society, and all the most common comforts of civilized life” (1833:108–9). The Texas Revolution of 1836 undercut this part of Holley’s sales pitch and necessitated a new book. In 1836 she replaced the epistolary gush with a workmanlike survey of settler possibilities in Texas and introduced the theme of Anglo-Saxon militancy . “The justice and benevolence of Providence will forbid that that delightful and now civilized region should again become a howling wilderness, trod only by savages, or that it should again be desolated by the ignorance and superstition , the tyranny and anarchy, the rapine and violence of Mexican misrule. The Anglo-Saxon American race are destined to be forever the proprietors of this land of promise and fulfillment. Their laws will govern it, their learning will enlighten it, their enterprise will improve it, their flocks alone will range its boundless pastures. . . . This is inevitable” (298). Holley now represents Mexicans as racially—inherently and inalienably— malign, at once brutal and cowardly, scheming and passionate: the stereotyped Mexican already fully realized. By “Americanizing Texas, by filling it with a population from this country who will harmonize in language, in political education , in common origin, in every thing, with their neighbors to the east and the north . . . Texas will become a great outwork on the west to protect the outlet of this western world, the mouth of the Mississippi . . . and to keep far away from the southwestern frontier—the weakest and most vulnerable in the nation—all enemies who might make Texas a door for invasion” (279).Among potential invaders are those determined to provoke what she calls “a servile war,” and here Holley, a Southerner by adoption, addresses southern readers in particular and invites them to settle Texas as a slaveholding territory, not to annex it to the United States but to protect the South. As for women...

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