Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity

5. Texas Identity West of the 100th Meridian

1 The motto on the side of the Fort Worth police cruiser reads, “Where the West Begins.” Fort Worth, located near the 97th meridian, is not where the West begins. That distinction belongs to Del Rio, San Angelo, Sweetwater, Lubbock, and Amarillo—all beyond the 100th meridian. Fort Worth lies at the eastern edge of Texas’s shatterbelt region, where environmental and cultural fragments of the West and the South collide and intermingle and where regional identity is mixed. Geographically, Fort Worth lies well east of the 100th meridian and John Wesley Powell’s twenty-inch rainfall line. In Texas the break point for aridity, the point at which successful agriculture requires irrigation, is west of the 100th meridian. In addition, beyond the 100th meridian, one discerns a distinct difference in the terrain and ecosystems. This is where the West really begins in Texas. Fort Worth, situated in an ecological shatterbelt region, lies in between the South and the West. Culturally, while Fort Worth manifests distinct, authentic elements of western identity, it also retains deep southern roots. Both the city and Tarrant County voted for secession by an overwhelming majority. In 1860 residents fearful of abolitionists and slave insurrections lynched two men at Crawford’s Limb on the west side of town. Clearly, a city that enthusiastically votes for secession and is worried about slave revolts and abolitionists is exhibiting southern sentiments. Ultimately, Fort Worth’s 5 Texas Identity West of the 100th Meridian WHERE THE WEST BEGINS 122 core characteristics lie somewhere between West and South; part of Texas ’s identity jumble. Fort Worth’s adept image branding, notably, “Where the West Begins ,” “Cowtown,” and “Cowboys and Culture,” has yielded significant economic dividends. The Old West brand has proven popular with both tourists and business conventions. With its frontier fort, Sundance Square, Stockyards, cattle drives, and livestock shows, the city certainly exudes a western character. Some of the western characteristics that Fort Worth “naturally” claims, however, were created during marketing campaigns , part of the city’s carefully cultivated image dating to the 1920s and Amon Carter.1 Marketing benefits aside, by focusing on Old West elements of its heritage, Fort Worth is simply doing what much of Texas did during 1930s—escaping C. Vann Woodward’s “Burden of Southern History” by replacing it with a Western identity. Randolph Campbell says that by selectively viewing itself as more western than southern, the Lone Star State escaped the embarrassing legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction that confronted former Confederate states. Campbell notes that by hiding behind cowboys, cattle drives, and outlaws, Texans “do not have to face the great moral evil of slavery and the bitter heritage of black-white relations that followed the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865.”2 The first scholar to explore this Texas escapism thread was John Stricklin Spratt. Writing in 1955, he pondered why Texans focused on the “romantic appeal” of their “Cattle Kingdom.” Spratt observed that the “continuing deluge of fiction, folklore, and mythology about the cattle country tends to shroud factual material in a fog of obscurity.” He speculated that Texans ignored certain parts of their history, most notably their “Cotton Kingdom,” because “cotton may be associated with the servile condition of slavery or the poverty of sharecropping.”3 Echoing Spratt’s conclusions, Walter Buenger found that the interpretive exhibits at the Texas State History Museum in Austin promoted a selective public memory. At the museum, King Cotton once again takes a back seat to the Cattle Kingdom. Buenger notes that the story of a state “dependent on cotton and coerced black labor fall[s] beneath the hooves 123 TEX AS IDENTIT Y WEST OF THE 100TH MERIDIAN of stampeding longhorns.” In this instance, however, Texas’s mixed identity proved helpful in creating a selective past. Other southern states had no similar Old West identity with which to cloak discomforting elements of their history.4 Texas’ssisterstatesintheConfederacyalsolackedtheAlamo,Goliad, and San Jacinto. The Texas Revolution narrative conveniently provided Lone Star residents a second escapist identity or passport with which to avoid their southern burden. Richard Flores and James Crisp date this second escapist thread in public memory to the Progressive Era. “It was no accident . . . that the veneration of the Alamo as a shrine of patriotic sacrifice crystallized” in the late 1800s and early 1900s “after more than 60 years of virtual neglect.”5 During the Progressive Era, Texas’s...