Where the West Begins: Debating Texas Identity

Notes

1 CHAPTER 1 1. Fort Worth Police car photographed by author, April 2009 (quotation one); Cashion, The New Frontier, 6; Sparling, “Texas Frontier Centennial,” Handbook , online, (quotation two); Kleiner, “Fort Worth Star-Telegram,” Handbook, online. The author found an early masthead from Nov. 10, 1925, for the Fort Worth Record-Telegram, Amon G. Carter, President and Publisher, with the motto, “Where the West Begins.” 2. Cashion, The New Frontier, 6 (quotations one and two). 3. Reynolds, Editors Make War, 97–117; Reynolds, Texas Terror, 83–8, 148–52, 153 (quotation), 154–67. 4 Texas Library and Historical Commission, Journal of the Secession Convention of Texas, 1861, ed. Winkler, 88–90. 5. The author adapted C. Vann Woodward’s famous phrase to fit Texas History. See Woodward, The Burden of Southern History. 6. Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 17, 18 (quotation), 19–22. 7. Ibid., 19 (quotations one and two), 20. Texas historians John Stricklin Spratt, Randolph Campell, Walter Buenger, and Gregg Cantrell all agree that since the Progressive Era, Texas has been trying to escape the legacy of its defeat in the Civil War and the subsequent humiliation of Reconstruction by appropriating alternative, escapist identities. For more on this, see Chapter Five. 8. “The Burdens of Western American History,” in Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 322–9, 330 (quotations one through three), 331–49. 9. Walter L. Buenger talks about the dangers of Texas history and myth becoming cartoonish in his article, “‘The Story of Texas’? The Texas State History notes NOTES 134 Museum and Forgetting and Remembering the Past,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 486–9; The Official Site of Texas Tourism, “Texas: It’s Like a Whole Other Country.” A recent series of Texas braggadocio postcards entitled “Everything ’s Bigger in Texas!” features a gargantuan roadrunner, armadillo, and longhorn. These cards are distributed by: Smith-Southwestern, Inc. of Tempe, AZ. 10. Buenger, The Path to a Modern South, xvi (quotation one); Lack, “In the Long Shadow of Eugene C. Barker: The Revolution and Republic,” Texas through Time, 134 (quotation two). 11. Lack, “In the Long Shadow,” 135–6; Graham, The Texas Literary Tradition, 4, 15. 12. Weighing in on Texas identity, Randolph Campbell says that Texas “is far more southern than western and has been so for nearly two hundred years.” Regarding public memory and Texas’s western identity, he argues that despite enduring legends of Texas cowboys and gunfighters, the West “is not the essence of Texas.” Harking back to C. Vann Woodward’s “Burden of Southern History,” Campbell says that for some people, “the cold history of being southern is not as pleasing as the warm memory of being western.” Campbell, “Entangled Stories of the Lone Star State,” in Lone Star Pasts, 279 (footnote quotations one through three). Campbell’s views on Texas’s southern identity are shared by James W. Lee, a professor emeritus of English specializing in southern literature . In an essay discussing the Old South literary tradition in Texas, Lee argues , “It seems evident to me that until well after World War II many Americans and most Texans saw the state as southern, not western.” Lee, “The Old South in Texas Literature,” The Texas Literary Tradition, 46 (footnote quotation four). Lee’s opinion taps into the ongoing debate over text and context, and whether literary theory constitutes history. For more on this, see Clark, History, Theory, Text, and Sewell, Logics of History. 13. Jordan, Texas, 7–17. 14. Vernon Bailey’s 1905 USDA Report, “Biological Survey of Texas,” can be found in: Schmidly, Texas Natural History, 68 (quotation one), 73 (quotations two and three). 15. Byrkit, “Land, Sky, and People: The Southwest Defined,” Journal of the Southwest . Byrkit’s well-researched and documented definition of the Southwest provides a far more precise cultural and physiographical baseline as to what constitutes the region than does Vandiver’s more general commentary, The Southwest. 16. Maptech Terrain Navigator Pro Version 8.0 U.S.G.S. Texas Series, topographic and aerial maps of Greenwood and Era, Texas. See also Francaviglia, The Cast Iron Forest, 38–40, 50. 135 NOTES 17. The author developed this shatterbelt concept over a seven-year period through dialogs with Ben Johnson, Robert Wooster, Frank de la Teja, Jerry Thompson, Todd Kerstetter, Sherry Smith, David Weber, and Bruce Dinges, all of whom offered helpful suggestions regarding regional identity in Texas. 18. Webb, The Great Plains, 8 (quotations one and...