Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains (review)

The first two decades of the twentieth century were, in many ways, a golden age for the Texas Panhandle. Tens of thousands of optimists, as John Miller Morris, an associate professor of political science and geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, describes them, immigrated into the twenty-four counties of the Panhandle region after 1906. They changed the region from one of distant ranches to hundreds of small farms and created bustling communities such as Canadian, Dalhart, Texline, and Statford that boomed with the arrival of the machine age.

There to document this transition were more than a dozen talented photographers, budding capitalists in their own right and hoping to benefit from the prosperity that seemed to be growing with the region. Some worked as self-employed businessmen in the new communities such as Amarillo, Canadian, and Clarendon; others were agents for real estate interests eager to promote the Panhandle land boom. Many of them were traveling professionals, itinerants who roamed from community to community, operating out of wagons that they had converted to traveling studios and developing labs. Following the Kodak boom and the popularization of photography, amateurs also got involved in documenting their own communities. Combing through census records and archives, Morris has restored some of the personal information about these little known pioneers.

In many cases, these photographers published their work in the ephemeral form of photographic postcards (approximately 3 ½ by 5 inch postcards that are actual photographs rather than reproductions of photographs), which is little studied today despite the large number of illustrated community histories that have appeared in the last few years. The cards were mailed to relatives who remained back home and were used by travelers who wanted to share their experiences with friends or relatives. Of course, they were used by real estate agents and others who wanted to promote the communities and encourage further immigration.

Morris has added an important chapter to the visual history of Texas with his well-chosen images, from cowboys to bleak Main Streets; farmyards to buffalo herds, trade days in the town square to desolate jails. Dust storms and snow storms are represented, as are the Fourth of July "Potato Race" in Stratford and courthouses, barber shops, and baseball teams. Photographer Uel J. Moore documented the elegant, new Grand Opera Building in Amarillo as well as the interior of the lobby and dining room at the O'Dell Hotel in McLean. George A. Addison pictured the "first new wheat" in Canadian in 1912, and the Ward Brothers of Gray, Oklahoma, photographed the 200-mile auto race in Ochiltree in 1916. Photographers lugged their cameras and equipment up water towers to get "bird's-eye" views of towns, marveled at the Palo Duro Canyon, and tried to capture the grandeur of the plains on a 3 ½ by 5 inch image. Gayle H. Baker documented an automobile traffic jam on Borger's Main Street when the city was only sixty days old, and Wilber Franklin McLemore showed the early drilling rigs that marked the beginnings of the oil industry in the city. The quality of the images is often amazing, and Texas A&M University Press has represented them well in this publication.

The Panhandle is only the first installment. Morris has rescued from oblivion literally thousands of photographs and dozens of photographers of early twentieth-century Texas and is preparing volumes on several other areas of the state with similar stories to tell.