Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan (review)

In 2015, the University of Texas Press announced an ambitious publishing project entitled the Texas Bookshelf, which would begin with a new overview of the Lone Star State’s history and continue with thirteen other volumes covering key subjects such as politics, business, music, and sports. Big Wonderful Thing, a title taken from artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s first reaction to seeing Texas, launches the series in the highly readable fashion that those familiar with Stephen Harrigan’s work as a journalist, essayist, and novelist would expect.

The book is huge, but it deals with a huge subject—the story of Texas from its prehistory until the first decades of the twenty-first century. Harrigan intends to be inclusive of the great variety of people who built Texas and to tell their stories in ways that would interest and entertain readers today. Accordingly, he begins most of the book’s fifty-six chapters with a vignette describing an individual or a small group who played notable roles in an important episode or development in Texas’s past. For example, from the Spanish colonial era, famous figures such as Cabeza de Vaca and LaSalle are featured, but so are persons such as María de Jesús de Agreda, “The Lady in Blue,” who likely are not so familiar to most readers. Perhaps the best chapter title of all is reserved for the one dealing with James E. Ferguson, the only Texas governor forced from office by impeachment. It is simply titled “Pa.”

Harrigan tells stories of many famous adventures of Texas’s past, such as the revolt against Mexico, the nearly ten years as an independent republic, the cattle drives and great ranches of the late nineteenth century, and the oil booms of the early twentieth century. However, he does not shy away from the ugly aspects of Texas’s past. For example, the chapter on Reconstruction begins with the story of the murder of Lucy Grimes, a freedwoman, by two former Confederate soldiers in Harrison County, a murder that went unpunished in spite of the efforts of the local Freedman’s Bureau agent to bring the killers to trial. He also recounts the brutal treatment handed out by Texas Rangers on the border to sediciosos, people of Mexican descent who were accused of conspiracy and violence against the United States during the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910.

Virtually all of the biographical vignettes are informative and good reading. For example, sketches of Heman Sweatt and Emma Tenayuca offer fine introductions to minority leaders often unknown in Anglo Texas. Some, such as the one on Lyndon B. Johnson, use the extensive research of others to paint indelible pictures of their subjects. And finally, the notorious, such as Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the much-romanticized killers during the early 1930s, and Charles Whitman, the infamous shooter from the UT Campus Tower in 1966, have their places.

Taken together, the biographical sketches create a great impression of Texas as a spectacular place populated over the years by people who in general never knew how to be dull. What Harrigan does not do (and, in fairness, never intended to do) is offer any general interpretation that provides Texans with what historians like to call a “usable past.” Such a history seeks to inform a people about where they have been with the intent of helping them understand where they are now as a guide to what they might try to do next.

Big Wonderful Thing is a popular history that does exactly what the author intended: provide highly readable and entertaining coverage of the sweep of Texas history. By contrast, an academic history of the Lone Star State would offer an interpretive account that might ask, for example, if Texas’s heritage is essentially southern, western, or something of an amalgam of the two with a strong Hispanic influence, best called southwestern. Answers to this question differ, and all are hedged...