The Robertsons, the Sutherlands, and the Making of Texas

Preface: A Family Tale

preface A Family Tale This book is at once a particular ethnographic history of Texas, a family memoir, and an essay on how identity and culture are made and remade over many generations. I have written it to answer these questions: Why do Texans have such a strong sense of themselves? Why are they so cussedly proud of being Texans? How did that identity develop? The families in this book do not represent all Texans, but their stories are representative of the American colonization of Mexican Texas, which in itself is only part of the whole story of the Lone Star State. The research is based on hundreds of people related to each other by blood or marriage— for example, the Sutherland, Menefee, Rogers, Heard, Dever, Wells, White, and Robertson families, who came to Texas in the early 1830s. Some of them are my ancestors. Their experiences up to the twentieth century are valuable in themselves. These were real people who lived real lives. Thus, in the first instance, my story is a witness to their existence, a way to bring them back to life in the present. At the same time, their story is worth preserving for reasons beyond its intrinsic value. First, in the process of settling Texas, these people developed a strong, unique family culture of very close kinship ties based on complex marriages among groups of sisters and brothers over several generations. These intermarriages created a powerful family relationship that became an intriguing piece of the larger Texas story. Their association of the 1830s grew out of affiliation, in contrast to the later popularized idea of West Texas “cowboy” culture, which was an identity of isolation. I have documented the development of that familial connection. Since these people are my forebears , I have privileged access to their original, unpublished documents, letters , poems, diaries, and oral histories. My membership in these families is advantageous in another way as well. The story is richer because I know from my own experiences the myriad versions of things that happened to them and how their lives evolved. I am also familiar with the contradictions built into their existence and the many views of what “becoming Texan” meant to them. All of this is deeply embedded in my own psyche. In addition, the family culture I have described is interesting not only because it is unusually interconnected but also because these families played an important role in the construction of Texas history. They made a signi ficant contribution to the larger texture of Texas history and ultimately the history of the United States. Texas became a nation through a series of highly contested struggles that are now viewed as canonical events in nineteenth-century U.S. history—the movement westward, the battles at the Alamo and San Jacinto, and the displacement of Indians and Mexicans by American settlers. This local record is an integral part of the history of this vast nation. It is also the bedrock of the Texas mystique, which is reinforced , often somewhat tastelessly, by the exotic stereotypes of Texas created in newspapers, books, and films. The family narrative I have written is one window onto the strong feelings of identity and pride that Texans have today . It also contributed to the stereotypes about Texas, and I draw on these because they too are an essential part of a Texas identity. To show how Texas identity has been constructed and reproduced up to the present, I first introduce my family’s current culture and describe the acquisition of my own identity. Then I show the way in which Texas history was taught in schools and books and portrayed in movies to those of us who grew up in the Lone Star State during the 1950s, before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The most influential text during that time was a comical pamphlet called Texas History Movies, which was distributed free to all Texas schoolchildren.1 Next I chronicle the history of my early Texas ancestors, who include two groups of people: the Robertson colony and the Alabama Settlement of the Austin colony. Both of these are well known in Texas history, but they have never been thoroughly mined and written up as part of it. Instead, historians have viewed them as peripheral to the main account of the Lone Star State. I begin with the high-level political shenanigans of Sterling Clack Robertson , a nephew of Gen. James Robertson in Tennessee and a man...